imagesIn my Word Press Back-up Page I wrote about the importance of creating regular back-ups of your Word Press site and having those back-ups stored at multiple locations.  All the sites hosted at AlexTechHost.com are backed up monthly in this manner at no charge to you – a service not generally offered by web hosting companies

A second somewhat related issue for Word Press sites concerns regular updates that are made to the underlying Word Press infrastructure of all Word Press sites and to your site’s plug-ins. Plug-ins are specific applications that have been added to the website to provide functions such as blog spam protection, social media sharing buttons, audio players, contact forms and much more.  All Word Press sites have a few basic plug-ins, and some have many more depending on the features of your particular site.

These updates occur several times a year and it is important for performance and even more for security reasons that you do not let your Word Press site and plug-ins fall too far behind the latest Word Press version.

Many of the updates include fixes to security issues that have come up in recent weeks or months.  If you fail to regularly update your site, it becomes much more vulnerable to hackers.  In addition, if you wait too long to update your site, and you’ve missed many updates in the meantime, the site could crash when you finally get around to updating it.

Years of experience have taught me that ALL Word Press sites hosted with me should be updated regularly and so what used to be called “Premium Web Hosting” is now the norm for all sites.

I will be backing up all the Word Press sites hosted with me on about the 19th of each month.  Three times a year, on the day before the back-ups, I will send you an email notifying you that I will shortly be backing up your site and then updating your Word Press site and plug-ins.  During that short period of a day or two, it would be best if you refrained from modifying the content of your site.

Unlike the regular monthly back-ups which are generated automatically, these updates need to be done manually and so I am charging an extra $25/year for this service, bringing your total hosting cost to $100/year.