Backing up your web site is never fun, but it is something that we all must do. Thankfully, cPanel makes the process easy - but I could see where more than a few folks might be scared about the process.

To help those who are unsure how to get cPanel to backup their web sites I thought I would go through the process step by step.

How Can I Get Started Backing Up With cPanel?

First thing you must do is login into your account’s cPanel and click on the Backup icon. Backing up is a very crucial thing to do because you never know when the worst might happen, and having a good backup could be the difference between being down for a few hours or for a few days.

Now once you have made it to cPanel’s backup page you should see several options available. “Generate/Download Full Backup” (under Full Backups) will allow you to do what you need. It might take a while depending on the size of your web site to generate but once it does - download that and you are almost done.

From this same screen you can download the latest backup created, download your MySQL databases and also depending on your web host you might be able to download your mail settings too.

Now after clicking on “Generate/Download a Full Backup” link you will be given a few more choices. For most users you will back the backup destination to be your home directory. Make sure you have enough disk space to host the backup file. There are other options, but we will ignore them for now. Under e-mail address you can tell the server where to send the log of the backup status. Once everything is as it should be click on the “Generate Backup” buttons and away you go.

How Can I Get That Backup Now?

Now you should be told that once the server finishes generating the backup for you - you will receive an e-mail at the address you gave it. Now if you click “Go back” or just navigate yourself back to the first screen of the backup page you can see that the backup is still “in progress”. After a few minutes or once you get that e-mail back from the server, you can download you backup from here.

Now you should have a full backup of your web site ready to restore if the worst case scenario might happen.

Web hosting is not an industry that only belongs to the northern half of the continental United States. I got a lot of grief on this show from time to time about my accent. I’m from Texas and proud of it though - so if that causes me to “talk a little funny” in your opinion then so be it.

There are many great southern people and companies that have made the web hosting business just a little better. So before you claim we are all beer drinking rednecks - maybe you should have a closer look.

Who Are These Southern Hosting People?

One of the most powerful publishers of the web hosting word is from down south. Ping! Zine, the web hosting magazine is based down in Louisiana. One of the biggest hosting providers out there today, the Planet is based in Texas. Another powerful web hosting firm down here in Texas is a little shop called Rackspace. C I Host would be yet another example of a big Texas-based hosting firm.

Now those are just a few of the big names. There are many more smaller names I could list - and this list could go on and on and on. One place where this topic was covered well was back in the March 2005 issue of the Web Host Industry review. If you haven’t seen that issue yet, I would recommend you check it out.

The Web Hosting World is for Everybody!

Do you get the point yet? Now I am not here to say that us funny talking southern people have claim on the reigns of the hosting world either. Truth be told, web hosting is a global market with a whole heck of a lot of funny sounding people.

Why is it that people from the dirty south get looked down upon in the web hosting world? You might not know it - but you too might even be getting your hosting from one of us good ol’ boys. Discrimination by location and tons more on this edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 129!
Running Time: 13 minutes | File Size: 5.92 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• Google PageRank Updates and Debate
• Discrimination Against Southerners in Hosting
• How to Backup Using cPanel
• Best of the Forum Scripts
• ICANN Investigates Insider Domain Registrations

Get your vienna sausages and oversized cup of coffee ready because I am going to deliver the dull and boring world of web hosting and web development in a way never before seen or heard. Here on the web hosting show we deliver you real hosting talk with none of the angry fan boys.

The guys behind a great video for Peer 1 contacted me yesterday about said video. Now usually I don’t like to do shameless advertising for just anybody, but this is an example of what I would like to see from more hosting companies out there. Final thoughts? Funny, well produced and I’m just waiting in anticipation for the next.

So you have a few friends or clients that need a web host, your pretty savy with the ins and outs of the web hosting world so why don’t you start up your own hosting company? Now many people might look at that and say that it is overkill - but becoming your own mini web hosting company is not so far fetched.

I Want One, What Is It?

So what is a reseller hosting account? If you want a dictionary definition, I would say a type of web hosting in which a person purchases a plan from the hosting company and then resell this plan to other customers.

Where do you find such hosting accounts? There are a lot of web hosts that offer good ones, you’ll just have to shop around. In many cases you will be given a large chunk of hosting space and bandwidth that you can cut up into smaller peices for all the domains you wish to host. You can think of it kind of like a dedicated server - except it is shared, and not so dedicated.

How Does it Work?

Once you have all your peices cut up - you can then turn around and sell this space to Tom, give this section to Molly and save that section over there for yourself. Each section gets its own control panel and acts like your usual shared hosting plan that you are probably more familiar with.

Now some companies take a different route with reseller web hosting. They will give you access to the master account, then you buy littler plans to stuff into your reseller hosting account as needed. If you need five hosting plans for five clients, you would go to them tell them you want a reseller plan with room for five and they will do the dividing up and setting up for you.

The nice thing about reseller hosting plans is if you actually resell to a large enough audience, the hosting plan can pay for itself. Down the line you might even upgrade that reseller account to a dedicated server where you could do all the same things but have more system resources to work with. Who knows, after that you might end up becoming your own web hosting company after all.

One of the many frequently asked question when it comes to web site creation is how can I get that web site running faster? Well, if you have a lot of images and video - you might want to look at optimizing both for use on the Web. Plain text travels fast, but once you get into some of the extra goodies that add flavor to your web site you might be running into trouble.

How Can I Optimize Images for the Web?

Images are probably the easiest to optimize for the Web. Not many people do it correctly though. Most image formats are compacted enough as it is - but you need to use a few of the best formats for the best performance. Use .png, .jpg, .gif and please oh please stay away from .bmp. The .png format would be my absolute favorite to get the smallest file size and be best looking picture once the compression of the image has been said and done. Read more »

Web sites have been taking a grave turn from putting up photos of your grandmother’s cats to an explosion of social interaction, user create videos and even audio shows just like this one. With services like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others ruling the Web world - there have been a lot of copy cats come up in the ranks as well.

What some people don’t realize is it takes a lot of web hosting power to run these titans of the new digital age. A web site like digg.com is not run on a $5.99 a month web hosting account. They probably have a whole farm of servers running that single domain.

Who Will Save the Day?

This is where deditated hosting companies come into play. Places like Rackspace and FastServers.net love this new growth because that means more people have reasons for purchasing more hardcore hosting accounts. So if that is the good news, then what is the bad news? Read more »