For the past few weeks quite a few people have been asking on a few forums I read whether or not it is a good idea to back up your computer onto a shared web server. From what I can tell, most people give the answer, “No”, and fail to elaborate any further, but I don’t do that. Here is why it is a really bad idea:
Hosting Contract!
Most (if not all) shared hosts have a wonderful line in the contract you agree to that says: “You may not use your web space for data backups”, or something like that. All that means is they want people to actually use their web space for something useful.
Lets face it, web hosts are hoping you get a package that promises 1 gig of space and 50 gigs of bandwidth but you only use 5 megs of space and 1 gig of bandwidth. They also hope you become popular and let people know who you use as a host (although a lot of webmasters and bloggers get paid for that these days).
Security
If your site is incorrectly configured, a web crawler could pretty easily get a list of your files and put them in search engines. Let alone anyone at the hosting company can see everything you put on there. It would be a pretty easy way to get caught with something illegal, that’s for sure.
Uploading Is Slow!
Unless you use a fiber optic connection, chances are your upload speeds are 1 mbit/second or less. That is slow. Even if you use some sort of syncing program that only uploads updated files, it is still pretty darn slow.
It is a bit like trying to put 50 gallons of water through a 1″ hose every second… simple math tells us it ain’t gonna happen that quickly.
Why Not Use A Local Device?
Yeah… umm… why pay $10 a month to backup your data when you could just buy a tape drive or an external (or even an extra) hard drive that you can have forever? It is more secure and much faster. Heck, even a DVD or flash stick works.
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
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