When looking for a home for your wordpress blog you want to make the right decision the first time. This comes to anyone looking for a cheap web hosting company but one of the complaints I hear the most is about having to move a blog and domain registration from host to host when they realize that the hosting company is not a great fit for them. The top two companies i recommend are ANhosting.com and Mariehosting.com Anhosting.com specializes in small business hosting and their prices have been the lowest in the industry for years. Their admins and even level 1 staff have a wide range of knowledge when it comes to wordpress hosting. the majority of their customers are small business who utilize the servers to sell their business ideas, brand identity and blogs. As small business companies get use to the idea of blogging and realize that this is the best way to get traffic from search engines wordpress becomes a more popular solution. It is easy to install through tools such as fantastico, which is included in most cpanel hosting companies control panel. Anhosting is one such company that utilizes fantastico’s ability to install popular scripts and keep them up to date. This allows the cusotmer a great experience in installing and keeping their wordpress script up-to-date.

Mariehosting.com is a niche market hosting company that has just started out their customers are also mainly only wordpress customers as they are looking to provide additional services for wordpress bloggers besides just hosting. My sources there have told me that they have some great wordpress tools in store for the very near future. Including automatic wordpress backup from the control panel. Currently customers through cpanel have to manually backup their files and databases for the whole cpanel account, or retrieve the backup from hosting companies at a price or convenience. Most hosting companies do not guarantee backups as things do happen and by time a customer needs a backup it may be related to the issue at hand.

You should backup your wordpress template themes, plugins, php customizations and databases at minimum. these things can be done by hand through an FTP program and mysql tools. You may also do these through the control panel but this will backup your entire account, takes longer and can be a big file to download. I recommend you log into ftp and retrieve a backup anytime you make changes to yrou theme and create a mysql backup at least every three months. I ask my customers “How much data are you willing to lose”, “If you made a post today and you lost everything except that one post you wouldn’t be extremely upset,” “But, if you lose three years of data you would be very upset.” Most of my customers are happy to log into their account through cpanel and creating a mysql backup every three months and backing up their theme templates and plugins when they add new features or make changes. Int he worst case scenario you would install a new instance of wordpress, upload your template files and plugins, import your database and could be up and running in the amount of time those tasks take. Don’t forget to reactivate your original theme.

When choosing a cheap web hosting provider it is important to ask them about how often they provide backups, how much it costs to restore a backup, how long it takes to restore a backup. I recommend createing yoru own backups on a regular basis do not depend on someone elses backup and servers as you may lose data, or have to wait a long time to get yrou data restored.

This is a simple script derived from the cPanel process that generates full account backups, only in PHP form. This makes the task of backing up your site easier and more reliable by allowing you to generate and maintain your own full site backups.

Download v1.6

• Automatic backup via Cron job
• Generates an actual cPanel backup in tar.gz format
• Very easy to set up, and executable with only one simple command
• Email notification when the backup is complete
• FTP option to transfer the backup file to a specified FTP server
• Compatible with monsoon, x, x2, and x3 themes

Requirements:

• cPanel 10 or higher with Cron job and backup functionality enabled
• PHP 4.1.x or higher
• FTP access (optional)

How to Use:

1. Download the script to your computer and extract the tarball
2. Edit the cpanel_backup.php file with your cPanel settings:

$cpuser = Your cPanel username

$cppass = Your cPanel password

$domain = The domain name where cPanel is run, usually without the www’s

$skin = cPanel skin that you are currently running. This will usually be “x3″ if you’re on cPanel 11 and “x” if you’re still on 10 (which I hope you’re not) but your webhost may have changed this. You can double-check by logging into cPanel and viewing your server settings:

The next section will set up the FTP options to upload the backup tarball to a server. If the FTP location is the same as the server you are doing the backup on, you should leave these fields blank.

$ftpuser = Username for your FTP site

$ftppass = Password for your FTP site

$ftphost = FTP hostname (usually ftp.yourdomainname.com)

$ftpmode = The mode in which you would like to have the file transferred. I would recommend “passive” mode, especially for larger sites.

$notifyemail = The email address that the backup confirmation should be send to once the backup is complete

$secure = Whether or not to allow the script to access your cPanel through its secure ports

$debug = Whether or not to show the detailed backup results in your confirmation email

4. Once the php file has been configured, upload it to your webserver. For security’s sake, it is very important that you make sure this file is located outside your document root (public_html) with permissions of 600

5. Now, all you need to do is set the crontab. Log into your cPanel and go to the “Cron Jobs” section and choose “Standard.” Here is where you will create the actual cron job to run the script whenever you want:

The command may vary depending on the setup of PHP on your server, but your Cron command will be as follows:

php -q /home/username/cpanel_backup.php

Known issues:

• Users having the rvskin theme have indicated that using ‘x3′ at the theme may work, but others have said that the the script just doesn’t work at all.  I’d say just try running a backup manually and see what theme is in your URL when you do it, and use that.

One of the most common questions I get is how do I backup my site through cpanel, how often should I backup my website and how do I run automatic backups of my website ?

When using cpanel your are presented with a few backup options. you can backup all the contents the home directory only, or just your individual databases. if the backup is going to be big cpanel can send you an email when the backup is complete. cpanel will provide download links to all the backups available on your account.

I always ask my customers “if your site were go down today how much data would you be ok losing?” most of my customers are running wordpress blogs and say that no more then 30 days of lost posts is acceptable. I myself run backups once a week. I back up the databases, plugin directory and the wordpress theme I am currently using.

wordpress can always be reinstalled you just need your theme, database and plugins to get back up and running. I have sucessfully restored sites for both myself and customers in less than 10 minutes using this technique. Wordpress also has its own backup option through the wp-admin control panel when you have the WordPress Database Backup plugin activated. This can email you a copy of your database, backup other databases on your account, save the backup to the server or provide you a direct download link.

see our next article on cPanel Automated Backup Script

When you log into ftp you will see all the folder the server needs to maintain your account, the public_html folder is where all your site content is located. If you set your ftp program’s destination folder to public_html then you will only see the content available on the web. We recommend that customer set this up in their ftp program to avoid confusion and to avoid customers accidentally deleting the folders the server needs for functions on your account. If you delete everything in your public_html folder this will be your entire website. I recommend creating a backup up your account in the cpanel first so that if you have to restore any files you can do it through your account which is faster and free.

You can log into webmail by going to https://yourdomain.com/webmail or https://yourdomain.com:2096 Where domain is your website.

To add this through your cPanel. Choose the menu option Add-On Domains

most shared hosting supports The Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Versioning System on our linux shared hosting accounts. CVS is an open-source version control system that keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, typically the implementation of a software project, and allows several (potentially widely-separated) developers to collaborate.

We support subversion software from

Fantastico is a commercial script library which automates the installation of web applications to a website. Fantastico scripts are executed from the administration area of a website control panel such as cPanel. Collection of PHP scripts that can be installed within cPanel, usually requires an available MySQL database.

The easiest and most preferred method for uploading files to your website, is to use a FTP Client.

Customer:
A couple of days ago people on my site were able to receive emails from my site if they were a Hotmail user. However this has all changed and suddenly the emails stopped being delivered. They do not reach Junk, or Inbox, there is no bounce back, they just disappear. The only time when Hotmail will deliver a message is if I have originially sent an email from Hotmail to the site and then replied. Otherwise they just disappear.

Windows Live Hotmail Support:
We have identified that messages from your IP are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen’s filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn’t spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless.

However, we also base our spam rating on the reputation of the sender. One way to positively impact the reputation of your IP is to obtain SPF/Sender ID records. This technology allows SmartScreen to better track emails from your IP, weeding out spoofed messages. You can find additional information on creating SPF records at http://www.microsoft.com/senderid

Please confirm that your emails comply with MSN Hotmail’s technical standards. This information can be found at: http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx

I hope that the information that I have provided to you has been helpful. You may also be able to find additional information on common delivery questions at the Hotmail Postmaster Site found at: http://postmaster.msn.com/. I would like to highlight some key areas which I believe are appropriate to your company.

Hotmail has created the Smart Network Data Services program. This is a service that helps legitimate email senders work with their customers and partners to reduce spam originating from their IP. http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/. This program allows a sender to monitor the ‘health’ of their IPs.

Monitor user complaints. Hotmail also has a sender complaint feedback loop program Junk Email Reporting Program (JMRP). Enrollment in this, free of charge, program will benefit you as a sender as it will keep your e-mail lists updated and populated with interested MSN Hotmail Customers. Participation in this program will remove those MSN Hotmail Customers who do not want to receive e-mails from your company. If you are interested in joining this program please visit Http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?pr…ail&ct=eformts.

While using the SNDS tool, enrollment in the JMRP or having your IPs registered with Sender ID will not allow emails from your mail servers to bypass our filters, these are in place to help legitimate companies deliver their emails to Hotmail Customers.

SenderScore Certified Mail Program. Many legitimate mailers and marketers have qualified and joined this white listing program to improve mail deliverability and decrease email from being filtered to the Junk E-mail Folder. Sender Score is a third party program, administered by Return Path. Sender Score (www.senderscorecertified.com) is the only White Listing service to which we subscribe.

The troubleshooting steps in this email are recommendations only. Microsoft makes no guarantees that following these steps will guarantee deliverability to MSN, Hotmail, or Live.com customers.

Suggested Resolution:
Contact tech support department can setup a SPF record for your domain, just email support and ask them to please setup a SPF record for your domain.