The Bluehost data center is the best in the business. While no system escapes the occasional problem, especially one with as many moving parts as a data center, our professional admin team is always on hand 24/7 to monitor our servers, replace and upgrade equipment, and ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible. But even when running perfectly, data loss still happens. The most common cause? Human error: people accidentally delete or overwrite existing files or emails.

Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy

Our internal backups can be super helpful when tragedy strikes, but the timing of these does not always capture the latest changes made to your website. That’s why we recommend you make your own personal backup every time you make significant changes to your site. And even if you aren’t often updating your website, regular monthly backups make it much easier to restore data if needed.

Here’s how to create backups of your files:

1. Login to your cPanel.
2. Scroll down to the ‘Files’ section and click the ‘Site Backup & Restore’ icon.
3. Select ‘Full cPanel Backup’.
4. Select the starting date from when you want to create a backup.
5. Select an archive type (.tar or .zip).
6. Download and Save the file.

It’s just that easy to create a reliable backup of your files right on your home computer for safe keeping. It just takes a few minutes to go through these steps and can help you avoid a lot of frustration and heartache. As always, call us if you have questions or need a hand!

One More Tip

Are you an advanced website builder? Lots of our clients prefer using more sophisticated backup tools. Our Site Backup & Restore Pro tool allows even more control when restoring and backing up files: you can elect to restore only individual files, only the files that have changed, or just databases and tables. Check it out!

Camille B.
Billing Manager

If you haven’t heard of this before, spam is the common term for unsolicited e-mail messages.  Usually these messages also carry a dangerous payload as well – from viruses to fraudulent scams – which makes them even worse.

Bluehost offers three major solutions for defeating these unwanted emails: SpamAssassin, SpamHammer, and Postini.  All are great products, but selecting the best one for you might depend on your level of technical expertise and the amount of time you can commit to making the solution work.

SpamAssassin is an open source product guided by the Apache Foundation.  Bluehost is committed to open source solutions and SpamAssassin is a great product with a number of configuration options to reduce spam. It does so by scoring messages and rejecting those that appear to be undesirable. SpamAssassin is free to all Bluehost customers.

SpamHammer is another anti-spam tool which uses temporary rejection of messages not from pre-approved senders. This is also free for all Bluehost customers.  One challenge introduced by using SpamHammer is that it can interrupt the instant flow of e-mail most of us are used to. Some e-mails might take a while to be delivered.

Postini is my favorite of the three products because of how well it works and how easy it is to use.  I use it on my e-mail accounts, and Bluehost uses it company wide for all company e-mail addresses.  Although it isn’t free, the cost is so low (currently $1.00 per month) it is well worth the investment.  Postini uses algorithms developed by Google to determine which messages are spam and filters them out (but still allows you to find those rare messages which should not have been filtered).  It does not require any kind of setup, although custom settings can be made.  On most of my accounts I have not even needed to view the settings. The reason Postini works so well is simple:

Imagine you decide to come up with a list of descriptions of spam and block all messages with those attributes.  That works great for a while, but spam changes and evolves rapidly. So you will probably need to update this list of attributes every day to keep up with changing trends.  To solve this problem you get some friends, neighbors, and family together to come up with more criteria.  With more good input, you get better results.

Postini works along these same lines except on a much larger scale.  In this case larger means rules based on billions of messages every day. So when you add Postini to any one of your e-mail addresses you are essentially joining with millions of other friends to combat unwanted e-mail.  That is a statistical recipe for success, and a way for you to make the world a better (and safer) place.

Take a stand today.  Fight spam.  If you need some help, contact us at 888-401-4678 or use our help center.  And if you know how to use these tools, help a friend.

Seth J.
Developer

Technology may change, but every successful business still needs one thing: customers. Gone are the days of catalogs and phone books. Pretty much everyone now uses search engines (like Google) to find what they’re looking for. So if your business website doesn’t appear in search engine results, it’s almost like you don’t exist!

That’s where SEO comes in. SEO refers to actual actions that, if taken, help your website appear towards the top of relevant search results. This is what gives your website more traffic by interested individuals.

Our video explains all this and runs through a real-word example of why SEO is so important for a business, or any website for that matter that could benefit from increased web traffic. Hope it helps!