Imagine the following nightmare: you've worked hard on your site for months, tweaking it until it looks perfect. You've got great content, excellent graphics and a wonderful design. Thousands of visitors are pouring in every day, and you are getting dozens of guestbook entries all telling you how wonderful you've done and hundreds of emails praising your good work.

One day you go to access your site and you get an error. Your site does not respond. You feel a little annoyed and try again a few minutes later ... your browser still times out. This goes on for hours and then for a full day. You feel panic rising in your gorge and your chest tightens up. You haven't slept and your wife is getting worried.

You've tried over and over to call your host's support number and it does not pick up. Their website doesn't show any problems ... it's a weekend so they are all at home watching the game.

Monday comes and you finally get an automated response to one of your panicky emails. Your host

• has had a hard disk crash and didn't have a backup ...

• or they didn't have any money and closed their doors ...

• or a hacker attacked their site and wiped out all of the files

• or your made a mistake with FTP and accidentally deleted all your work

• or the host got hit by the dreaded xyz virus ...

• or "fill in the blank"

And you didn't have a backup of your site.

I have even read report about one user who had over a gigabyte on his website of years of hard work with no backup of his own. His host decided he was getting too much traffic and simply deleted his site. The poor guy and to send a note to everyone on his email list begging people to check their browser cache's to see if they could send him the graphics and pages ... it took six months but he rebuilt his site (and now he has a backup).

The moral of the story ... backup your web site. I don't care whether you've got it on Homestead, AOL or Addr.com, if you don't make your own backup you are taking the chance that you could loose all of your work ... forever.

How do you back up your site? What I do is make sure that I edit my site on my OWN hard drive, then upload it as I make changes. That way I always have my own copy (and, of course, I make a backup of that also). If you don't or can't do that, then just use FTP to copy the files to your own hard drive once in a while.

If you have no other choice, you can use the "Save As..." functions to save the graphics and HTML pages. Note that if you do this you will capture your sites banners also so this is not the preferred method.

So backup your site. You will be glad that you did.