One of the many reasons that Bluehost is our #1 recommended host is that they provide automated backups that you can access in your cPanel area. So, if you need to recover specific files, your database files, or your entire site, you can access your automated backups in Bluehost’s cPanel area. Certain options are only available to “Pro” users, such as individual file restoration but the most important backup options are available to all.
Backing Up
You don’t need to do a thing! The coolest thing about backing up with Bluehost is this. Bluehost is always automatically backing up your site in the background and putting the backups into dated folders for you to access later. The instructions below are for restoring your site or actually downloading a copy of a backup.
Downloading Your Backup Files
The first thing you’ll want to do is to login to your Bluehost control panel.
Once you’ve logged in, find the ‘Files‘ area and click on ‘Site Backup & Restore‘.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice that you have a few different backup options, some of which are free, and other “Pro” options which require a small yearly fee.
Free Backup Options
- You can click the ‘Full cPanel Backup’ option, which will provide you a full back up all of the files on your server and your database. (This is like doing all of the steps (1a, 1b and 1c) in our backup tutorial in one shot:
- You can click on the ‘Website Files‘ option to download a backup of your server files specifically (which is Step 1a of our backup tutorial)
- You can choose the ‘MySQL Databases (Individual)’ option to download a backup of your database (which is like Step 1b/1c of our tutorial). We always encourage everyone to also establish an automated database backup via the the wp-db-backup plugin.
Bluehost “Pro” Backup options
For a small yearly fee of around $13 you can upgrade to a “Pro” account with provides expanded backup options. See the list below of the added features.
The great value in upgrading to the “Pro” level is that you can schedule backups however you like, and customize them to fit your needs. Or if you run into a problem you can restore very specific files.
So if your blog is with Bluehost, you might find this process to be a little easier and less time consuming. If you don’t yet have Bluehost, you can get $30 back by singing up for hosting through our link.
Below is a helpful video describing this same process produced by expand2web.
