In addition to our nightly backups, there are a number of ways you can backup your website yourself.  We’ve listed 3 ways below:

cPanel backup tool (EASY)

First login to cPanel, you will find the cPanel login details in your hosting account welcome email.  Once logged in, look for the “Backups” icon.  You have the option to backup your whole account, including files, databases, emails, etc, by clicking “Download or Generate a Full Website Backup”.Or you can backup the html files and databases separately by clicking the download links under “Download a Home Directory Backup” and “Download a MySQL Database Backup”.  This is a manual process and is best done just before a major upgrade of your website. UPDATE: You can also use the cPanel backup and restore wizard method – click here for more info.

FTP and phpMyAdmin (MODERATE)

If you know how to use an FTP program such as Filezilla, you can connect to our servers using the details in the hosting account welcome email and download your entire “public_html” directory.  This directory contains all of your WordPress files.  Although, files are only half the story… You will also need to login to “phpMyadmin” and download the database as well.  To do this, login to cPanel and look for the “phpMyAdmin” icon.  Click this and a new window will open.From here, you’ll see a link at the top of the screen named “Export”.  You shouldn’t need to change the default options, but can if you know what you’re doing.  In the bottom right of the page you’ll see a “go” button.  Click this and the database should start downloading to your computer.

WordPress backup plugin (EASY)

There are a number of backup plugins available for WordPress which provide different backup options and features.  As there are different plugins for various WordPress versions, rather than list them all here, take a look at the WordPress plugins directory and search for “backup” – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/