These are a few things you should know about your WordPress website in general and in case of emergency. Take a few minutes one day (soon) and track down all of this info and put it into the Google Doc I have provided below. Hopefully, you will never need it all in an emergency, but it will be good to have in one place if you do.
A domain registrar is an organization or commercial entity that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. It is the company where you bought your domain name (for this site – www.glenneth.com) and make payments yearly (or every so many years) to keep the domain name. I buy my domains through GoDaddy.com. Others are NameCheap.com and Name.com. You should know their website, your username, and password. If your site goes down (and is not hosted on your domain registrar), you will probably not need this info, but it is good to have.
A web hosting service provider is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website to be viewed on the Internet. This is where your website lives. Many domain registrars also provide web hosting, so this COULD be the same as above. This site (glenneth.com) lives on Turnkey Internet. My fitness blog, yourpathtofit.com, lives on SiteGround.com.
At a minimum, you need to know where your site lives (their URL), your username, and password. To restore a site from VaultPress, you also need to know server IP address, port number, cpanel username and password.
While many hosting providers also provide backup options (NOTE: not all of them do, so don't assume they are making backups of your site), I HIGHLY recommend a third party backup provider such as Vaultpress.com. The reason for this is IF something happens to your hosting provider's servers and/or backups, you will have a backup that lives OFF SITE. Some might say it is redundant, but in the case of technology, having a redundant backup is a good thing.
If you use VaultPress (or another provider), go ahead and setup all the access it would need in case of an emergency. Vaultpress needs the server IP address, port number, cpanel username and password AND has to have a key uploaded to the SSH access file (your hosting provider should be able to do this for you – SiteGround did it for me).
WordPress.com manages your WordPress sites and some “paid” services like VaultPress.com.
Click on the Google Doc link below and make a copy. When you get a chance, complete the document with all of your information.
Note: None of these links are affiliate links.
