Backup service is becoming a necessity in today's web hosting needs, its always a good thing to see that back up whether it is daily, weekly or monthly is included in a web hosting package that your about to signup for, we will discuss in this article the different backup methods currently available in the linux web hosting market, as well as the windows web hosting market.

There are a number of back up methods, we will go through them, discuss their pros and cons if any. We will discuss the most common backup methods for dedicated servers.

The 1st backup method would be the 2nd hard drive, this is a common inexpensive method to back up your clients data either manually or using a program, this method while inexpensive has a drawback which is reliability, meaning that incase a power outage hard disk failure etc... you might loose the backups you have made, so backing up on the same physical server is an option but probably not the most intelligent one.

Disk mirroring can also be accomplished using a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), where data can be simultaneously written to a number of disks using a variety of methods, backups can be also made to CDrom's or magnetic tapes

The 2nd backup method would be FTP backup to a remote server, also a very common backup method, and an inexpensive one as well, we use this method for our Cheap Linux web hosting plans its an excellent cost effective  backup method and is more secure than backup on another hard disk. This method is also used with our Affordable windows web hosting plans.

Its always a smart idea, especially with important data to backup to a number of offsite locations, incase a disaster or a certain failure happens to one location, you will have another backup ready somewhere else, backups can be made on a daily weekly and monthly basis.

Those are the most important backup methods currently used in the web hosting industry.