Support Operations
Hosting with daily backups — Backups are the easy half; restores are the product
Every reseller advertises daily backups and very few have ever timed a restore, which is a problem that reveals itself on exactly one afternoon.
Straight answer first
Treat the restore, not the backup, as the thing you are selling: a daily copy on every account is the baseline everywhere, and what actually distinguishes a reseller is whether the client can put things back themselves in minutes and whether you have ever timed it.
Below: who should be allowed to run a restore, what to charge for the ones you run, how retention behaves across a book of client accounts, and the quarterly drill that turns an advertised feature into a capability you can honestly promise.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
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Most lost data is lost by its owner — a botched update, a bad plugin, a file deleted at speed. Clients do not usually need rescuing from an attacker; they need rescuing from Tuesday. That changes what a backup product is for, and it changes who should be able to operate it.
On the platform, a backup is taken daily on every plan, the Elite shared shelf at $7.08/mo takes them every six hours, and the Elite WordPress and Elite Store shelves at $9.09/mo take them every four. Restores run from the panel — files, databases or both — in minutes rather than by ticket.
Who should be allowed to press the button
The instinct is to keep restores to yourself, on the grounds that a client might restore the wrong thing. The arithmetic disagrees. A restore the client can run at three in the morning without joining a queue is a ticket you never receive, an outage that lasts minutes rather than hours, and a client who tells other people that their agency's hosting saved them.
So leave Backup visible in the package you build for most clients, and teach it once at onboarding — pick the date, choose files or databases or both, confirm. It is genuinely that simple, and a client who has done it once under supervision will do it correctly under pressure.
Keep it hidden only where the risk genuinely warrants it: a trading shop where restoring the database would discard real orders placed since the copy was taken, or a client whose staff turnover means the person with the login changes twice a year. For those, be explicit that restores go through you, and set a response target you can meet.
What to bill, and what to absorb
Absorb the platform's own failures without discussion — if something on the hosting side caused it, restoring is part of what they pay for and charging looks grasping. Absorb the first client-caused restore too, as a piece of relationship management; it costs you ten minutes and buys a great deal of goodwill.
Bill the rest at your hourly rate, and say so in the care plan before it happens. A client who breaks their own site with an unreviewed plugin every six weeks is not consuming hosting, they are consuming your afternoons, and a line item is the only mechanism that changes the behaviour.
The one thing not to do is bill for a restore after a failure you could have prevented. If the incident traces back to an update you applied without staging, or a backup you never verified, the invoice will be remembered longer than the fix. Staging copies are included on the plans precisely so that the preventable category stays small.
Retention across a book of accounts
Backups consume space, and on a reseller allotment that space is yours. Reseller 1 gives you 30 GB of NVMe in total; the copies of twenty client accounts with their mailboxes are a meaningful fraction of that, and it is a fraction that grows every month whether or not any client's site does.
So decide retention deliberately rather than accepting whatever appears. Understand what the daily cycle keeps, know which of your accounts are on shelves with shorter cycles — every six hours on the Elite shared shelf, every four on Elite WordPress and Elite Store — and match the cadence to what each client would actually lose.
Then keep something outside the platform for the clients who genuinely matter. An offsite copy of a trading shop or a client's only revenue-generating asset costs very little and covers the scenarios that keep cautious people awake. Nothing here stops you, and being able to say you do it is a differentiator that costs a few pounds a month.
The quarterly drill
Pick one client account at random. Restore it into a test account. Time it. Note what broke, what you had to look up, and whether the restored copy actually worked. This is twenty minutes a quarter and it converts an advertised feature into a capability you have personally verified.
The things it catches are always the same and never obvious in advance: a database user that had to be recreated, a cron job the backup did not carry, a path hard-coded into a plugin's configuration, an SSL certificate that needed reissuing against the temporary hostname. Every one of those is a five-minute problem when you have met it before and a two-hour problem at four on a Friday when you have not.
Record the drill and the time it took. When a client asks in an incident how long this will take, an honest number based on a rehearsal is worth more than reassurance — and when a prospective client asks what you do differently, a quarterly restore drill is one of the few answers in this trade that competitors genuinely will not have.
The half nobody rehearses
A backup taken daily on every plan is a baseline, and every host has one. Restores you have actually timed, on accounts you actually carry, is the part that separates a reseller who advertises a feature from one who has a procedure.
Restores run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both — which is what makes putting the button in a client's hands a sensible decision rather than a reckless one.
- Daily copies on every client account
- Six-hourly on Elite shared, four-hourly on Elite WP and Store
- Restores from the panel in minutes
- Your own offsite copy for the accounts that matter
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
A restore the client can run
Files, databases or both, from the panel, in minutes — which is a ticket you never receive and an outage that lasts minutes.
Shorter cycles where they matter
Every six hours on Elite shared and every four on Elite WordPress and Elite Store, for the accounts where a lost day costs real money.
Staging to keep the preventable rare
Included copies mean the update that would have needed a restore gets tested somewhere nobody can see.
Retention you decide
Backups consume your allotment, so the cadence and what you keep outside the platform are deliberate choices rather than defaults.
A drill you can quote
A rehearsed restore time is the honest answer to the only question a client asks during an incident.
Nothing stopping an offsite copy
Keep your own copy of the accounts that genuinely matter — it costs little and it is a differentiator you can name.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Decide per package who can restore
Visible for most clients, hidden for trading shops where a database restore would discard real orders — and say which in the care plan.
- 2
Teach the restore once at onboarding
Ten supervised minutes now means a client who does it correctly under pressure later, without calling you.
- 3
Write the billing rule before you need it
Platform failures absorbed, first client-caused restore free, the rest at your hourly rate — agreed in advance, not during.
- 4
Run a restore drill every quarter
One random account into a test account, timed, with notes on what broke — twenty minutes that turns a feature into a capability.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Daily backups confirmed running on every client account
- Backup cadence matched to each client's actual exposure
- Restore visibility decided per package, not per request
- A supervised restore walked through at client onboarding
- A written rule for what is billed and what is absorbed
- Staging used before any update on a client site
- Aggregate backup consumption reviewed against your allotment
- An offsite copy for the accounts that genuinely matter
- A quarterly restore drill recorded with its timing
- The drill result available for the annual client summary
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Should I let clients restore their own sites?
For most of them, yes. A restore from the panel takes minutes and covers files, databases or both, and a client who can rescue themselves at three in the morning is a client who never opens a ticket about it. The exceptions are trading shops, where restoring a database discards orders placed since the copy, and clients whose staff change often enough that the login is unreliable. Decide per package rather than per request.
How often should a client's account be backed up?
Against what they would lose. Daily is the baseline on every plan and is right for brochure sites. The Elite shared shelf at $7.08/mo runs every six hours; Elite WordPress and Elite Store at $9.09/mo run every four. Ask a trading client what an afternoon of orders is worth and the cadence chooses itself — that is a merchant's arithmetic, not a hosting argument, and it sells the upgrade for you.
Do backups count against my reseller allotment?
Space consumed on your plan is space you are paying for, and backup consumption grows steadily whether or not the client's site does — mailboxes especially. Reseller 1 carries 30 GB of NVMe in total, so review the aggregate quarterly rather than annually, and remember that stepping up to Reseller 2 at $29.99/mo with 60 GB is a line change on your own account.
Should I keep my own copy as well as the platform's?
For the accounts that genuinely matter, yes. Belt and braces is cheap: the platform's automatic copies cover the ordinary cases, and your own offsite copy of a trading shop or a client's only revenue asset covers the ones that keep cautious people awake. Storage costs very little and nothing here prevents it. It is also one of the few genuine differentiators you can name in a pitch.
What actually goes wrong during a restore?
The same handful of things every time, which is why the drill matters: a database user that needs recreating, a cron job the copy did not carry, a path hard-coded in a plugin's configuration, and a certificate that needs reissuing against a temporary hostname. Each is five minutes if you have met it before and two hours if you meet it for the first time during an incident.
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Daily copies on every client account, shorter cycles on the Elite shelves, and restores from the panel in minutes.
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