Storm Season Is Here: Backup Your Website Before SWEPCO Blinks
Key takeaways
- Storms knock out more East Texas websites than hackers do. SWEPCO outages, fried equipment, hosting failures during peak load — all of it.
- If you couldn’t restore your site by lunch tomorrow, you don’t have a backup. You have wishful thinking.
- “Off-site, off-server, off-network” is the rule. A backup stored on the same server as your website is not a backup.
- Most small business owners think their host backs them up. Some hosts do. Most do it poorly.
The Marshall flash flooding earlier this week is a good reminder of how East Texas weather works. SWEPCO is putting two hundred million dollars into the grid for storm and wildfire hardening. The county utility folks are bracing for another long, hot, severe-weather summer.
And your website is sitting somewhere on a server, probably one you’ve never met, owned by people who may or may not have a real backup plan for you. Now feels like a good time to do something about that.
What actually takes websites down in East Texas
It is almost never a hacker. The order of likelihood, from what I see in this region, goes:
- The owner or their nephew breaking the site during a “small update.”
- A WordPress plugin auto-updating and conflicting with another plugin.
- Hosting issues during a regional power or network outage.
- Expired SSL certificate or domain registration nobody noticed.
- Theme update breaking the homepage.
- Hosting account hitting a resource limit nobody knew existed.
- An actual security incident (a distant last).
Six out of seven of these get fixed in an hour if you have a recent, working backup. They turn into multi-day nightmares if you don’t.
What counts as an actual backup
If your “backup plan” is one of these, you don’t have a backup plan:
- “My host does backups, I think.” (Most don’t, well. Or they only keep them seven days.)
- “My web designer probably has a copy somewhere.” (Probably doesn’t.)
- “I exported the content once last year.” (Content isn’t the whole site. You’re missing the theme, the plugins, the settings, the database tables, and probably the media library.)
- “It’s on the server, the server is fine.” (When the server isn’t fine — which is exactly when you need the backup — neither is your backup.)
A real backup means: a complete copy of your website’s files and database, stored somewhere that is not the same server your website lives on, refreshed at least weekly, and tested at least once.
The easy way: a WordPress backup plugin that ships to off-site storage
If you’re on WordPress, this part is genuinely simple in 2026. A handful of reputable plugins (UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, BackupBuddy, Jetpack VaultPress, Solid Backups, several others) will do the whole job:
- Run automated backups daily or weekly on a schedule.
- Back up both files and the database (the database is where your posts, settings, and customers live).
- Push the backup to off-site storage — Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, BackBlaze, or the plugin’s own cloud.
- Keep multiple historical versions (so if you don’t notice something broke for a week, you can still restore from before).
- Let you restore with a couple of clicks.
Most of these cost between $50 and $200 per year. For a business website, that’s cheap insurance.
The “3-2-1” rule (borrowed from IT folks, applies just fine here)
The classic backup rule is:
- 3 copies of your data.
- 2 different types of storage.
- 1 copy off-site.
For a small business website, that translates to: the live site, a backup on your host’s system, and a backup in cloud storage somewhere else. That covers you against just about every realistic scenario.
What about hosting that “comes with backups”?
Many hosts advertise backups. The reality varies widely. Some keep a 7-day rolling backup that costs $5 per restore. Some keep weekly backups for 30 days and restore is included. Some don’t actually back up the database with the files — meaning you can recover the theme but lose the customer data.
Read the actual terms. Don’t trust the marketing page. The questions to ask:
- How often are backups taken?
- How long are they kept?
- Are files and database both backed up?
- How do I restore — is it self-service or do I file a ticket?
- How long does a restore take?
- Is there a charge per restore?
The “after the storm” checklist
When a regional outage happens — power flickers, internet goes weird, SWEPCO sends one of those updates — here’s the routine:
- Check your website on cellular data (not your home Wi-Fi, in case that’s also weird).
- If the site is down, check your host’s status page.
- If your host is up but your site is down — log into your dashboard and look for plugin errors.
- If you can’t fix it in 15 minutes, restore from yesterday’s backup.
- If you can’t restore from yesterday’s backup, call your web designer. (Or get one.)
What about during the actual storm?
This is a good seasonal note: if a storm is forecast to hit hard, this is a good night to:
- Run a fresh manual backup before the weather gets loud.
- Pause any planned automated updates that might fire mid-storm.
- Make sure your contact form notification email isn’t dependent on infrastructure that’s about to lose power.
- Have a way to reach your customers via social media if the site goes down.
| Recovery scenario | With real backups | Without backups |
|---|---|---|
| Bad plugin update broke the homepage | Restore in 15 minutes | Pay someone for 4 hours of repair |
| Site corrupted during a power blip | Restore in 15 minutes | Possibly lose data permanently |
| Hosting account suspended | Move backup to new host in a day | Rebuild from scratch over weeks |
| Someone in the office “fixed” something | Restore to yesterday’s version | Slow, manual, expensive recovery |
| You want to test a major change | Restore if it goes wrong | Can’t safely try anything |
Backups are like flood insurance. You don’t need them until the day you really, really need them.
Where people go wrong (and when to call a pro)
The most common backup mistake is installing a plugin, clicking “activate,” and assuming the rest is handled. Then a year later something breaks, you go to restore, and discover the plugin stopped running months ago because of some quiet error nobody caught. The fix is to actually verify your backups every few months — open the dashboard, confirm the last successful backup was recent, and once in a while restore to a staging site to make sure the file is actually intact. If that maintenance loop sounds like something you’ll never get around to, paying a web pro for ongoing maintenance is usually worth more than the plugin license itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I back up my website?
For a typical small business site that updates a few times a month — weekly is fine. For an e-commerce site taking orders daily, you want daily backups. For a busy blog or news site, even more frequent.
How much does a real backup setup cost?
Plugin licenses run $50–$200 per year. Off-site storage (S3, BackBlaze, etc.) is usually a few dollars a month for a small site. Total: under $300/year for solid coverage.
Will a backup restore my Google rankings if the site went down?
If you restore quickly (within hours), your rankings usually recover without much issue. If your site is down for days, you can see real ranking drops that take weeks to recover from. Speed of restoration matters.
What about my email and customer data?
Website backups usually include the site’s database, which includes customer accounts, orders, and form submissions. They generally don’t include email running on a different service (like Google Workspace). Back those up separately.
If you’re not sure whether your site actually has real backups (most don’t), we can take a look and fix it before storm season really gets going.