Imagine you decide to be cautious and make a spare key for your house in case of an emergency. But, instead of giving it to a trusted family member, you decide to hide that backup… inside your own kitchen drawer. If you ever lose the original key and get locked out, the spare won’t do you any good because it is locked in the exact same place you are trying to enter.
Although it sounds absurd, this is exactly what 80% of website owners do with their backups.
At DapSite, we know that just having a backup isn’t enough; where you store it is the real difference between saving your business in 10 minutes or losing years of work forever. Here we explain the hidden danger of local backups and how we truly armor your information.
The Hidden Danger of “Local Backups”
Most budget-friendly hosting services or free website tools do something called a “local backup.” This means they bundle all of your website’s files and save that giant package on the exact same server where your page is hosted.
It is the digital equivalent of keeping the spare key inside the house. If the server fails, you lose the website and you lose the backup.
Here are the three scenarios where a local backup will leave you stranded:
1. Data Hijacking (Ransomware and Hacks)
If a hacker manages to breach your server, they won’t just inject viruses into your public website; they will also infect or delete the folder where you keep your local backups. When you try to restore your site to clean it, you will realize your “life preserver” is also poisoned.
2. Maxed-Out Hard Drives and Website Crashes
Every time you run a local backup, you are doubling your website’s weight. If your page weighs 2 GB, in a single month of daily backups, your server will be stuffed with 60 GB of junk files. When the server’s hard drive hits 100% capacity, your website collapses, goes offline, and stops selling.
3. Physical Disasters in the Data Center
Servers are not magical clouds; they are physical computers in giant buildings. If your provider’s data center suffers a fire (like the famous OVH blackout in Europe that destroyed millions of websites), a flood, or a catastrophic hardware failure, the physical hard drive burns. If your website and your backup were on that exact same drive, your digital business ceases to exist.
The DapSite Standard: Off-Site Backups
Professionals don’t leave their rescue plan in the danger zone. They use Off-Site Backups.
This means that every time we back up your website, we encrypt it and send it through a secure tunnel to a completely independent and geographically distant cloud server (like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud).
Within our Support Plans, this is our standard rescue strategy:
| Situation | With Local Backup (Traditional Hosting) | With Off-Site Backup (DapSite Support) |
| The physical server catches fire | You lose your website and your backups. You have to start from scratch. | We have your data in an external vault. We clone your website onto a new server in minutes. |
| Ransomware Attack | The hacker encrypts your website and also encrypts your local copies. | The hacker has no access to our external vault. We delete the infected server and restore the clean version. |
| Hosting Storage | Fills up quickly, charging you penalties or crashing your site. | Your server stays light and fast. We absorb the cost of the external cloud storage. |
Conclusion: Real life insurance for your business
Having a backup on the same server as your website is an illusion of security. True technological rescue requires redundancy, isolation, and military-grade cloud storage.
Do you know exactly what country and what server your website’s backups are stored on?
If the answer is “no,” your business is at risk. With a DapSite Support Plan, we schedule automatic, daily, off-site backups to armored cloud vaults. No matter what happens to your server, we will always have the key to recover your business in minutes.