When was the last time you backed up your computer? More importantly, have you ever backed up your website? While malware and viruses are still around, many people know what to do when their computers are having problems. There are endless products for scanning your computer system and deleting those problem issues. But the vast majority of website owners rarely, if ever, back up their sites. It is generally too hard or involves too many steps to be done quickly.
Website owners may have an old copy of the original site and a copy of some of the pages they recently changed, but few are organized enough to have a complete current copy of their existing sites. There have been services that offer this in the past, and some hosting services offer it as an add-on, but the cost has been prohibitive in most cases.
Well now there is a company that offers this service and the costs are minimal if not free.
CodeGuard not only backs up your site, it monitors it on a set time frame and alerts you to any changes that have been made. If you have not changed the content on your site but there is an alert that there were changes, you know you have been hacked.
"When disaster strikes, use CodeGuard to easily roll back the changes," the site explains. "CodeGuard checks your site hourly, daily or weekly... you choose. If we notice that anything has changed, we will alert you." Sort of like a Google Alert for your website content.
CodeGuard keeps every version of your web site — clean or compromised — in its secure repository. As company founder Jonah Stein said "you can't stop hackers or malware so avoid the pain for yourself and your clients."
CodeGuard acts as your 'in the cloud' back up - though not an advanced version system which many large online companies use - this is a handy way to have your site backed up every hour, day or week. "When disaster strikes, use CodeGuard to easily roll back the changes. It'll be like nothing ever happened!" the site states.
If you have ever had to deal with overwritten code containing errors or a straight hack of your web site, this service is invaluable. The free level allows one site and 250 MB of storage, but for $10 a month you get a gig and multiple sites covered.
The following video was taken at TechCrunch Disruptive in New York earlier this year:
[youtube]rLVxo-ZT60g[/youtube]
