Backups, scheduled tasks and statistics

Three things on this page, because they are the ones you set up once and then mostly leave alone.

Backups#

A backup of a hosting account covers:

• Your whole home directory, which is every file of every site
• Every database
• Every mailbox

So unlike a game server backup, this one does include your databases and your mail. One backup, everything.

You will be able to:

• Create one, optionally with a note so you remember why
• Restore one, which puts those files, databases and mailboxes back over what is there now
• Download one, so you have a copy that is not on our infrastructure
• Delete one

Restoring replaces what is there. Anything written since the backup was taken is gone. Take a fresh backup before restoring an old one and you keep both options.

Download one before any big change, such as a content management system upgrade or a PHP version change. A copy on your own machine is the only copy that survives everything.

Scheduled tasks#

A scheduled task runs a command on a clock. You set the minute, the hour, the day of the month, the month and the day of the week, and the command to run.

The usual uses:

• The scheduler a content management system wants, instead of relying on visitors to trigger it
• A nightly database export
• A script that imports a price list or sends a digest

Commands run as your account's user, never as an administrator. So a task can do anything you could do with your own files and nothing beyond them.

Two things worth doing:

Do not schedule anything every minute unless it genuinely needs it. Every five or fifteen minutes is almost always enough and it is far gentler on your resource allowance.

Make the command write somewhere you can read. A task that fails silently is a task you will not notice for a month.

Statistics#

Two kinds.

Traffic shows bytes in and out per day, per site, over a number of days you choose. That is what counts against your plan's monthly allowance, so this is the page to check if you are approaching it.

Visits shows, for one domain over a number of days: how many requests, how many unique visitors, your top pages and a breakdown of response codes.

The response codes are the useful part nobody looks at. A pile of 404s means something is linking to a page you removed. A pile of 500s means your application is failing and you should check your logs.

These figures come from the requests your site actually served, so they count things an analytics script in the browser misses, including bots and anything that blocks scripts. They are not a replacement for analytics, and the two will never agree. Use them for capacity and for spotting faults.