In 2025, it’s pretty wild to think that 44% of businesses have no disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. Even the most forward thinking founders who protect their data like Fort Knox can still face costly interruptions. 

From rapidly evolving cyber threats to natural events like flooding, the potential for disaster is higher than ever – and server outages don’t wait for anyone… so neither should you. Instead of crossing your fingers thinking “it’ll never happen to us”, make a choice to protect what you’ve worked hard for, with Fasthosts. 

The nightmare scenario: When websites go dark

Picture the scene: Sales are flying on your online shop, you’ve just done your quarterly projections, and got all your financial ducks in a row – you’ve even made an extra hire. Then, BAM! Your site goes down, you don’t know why or how long for, all you know is that your momentum and everything you’ve built is on a knife edge.

Just a scary story, right? Well, this is a daily reality for businesses everywhere. The resulting downtime is your worst enemy which will hit you first with lost revenue, dealing a second blow with frustrated customers, and a final strike of damaged reputation – the impact of which is all down to your recovery time.

In fact, IT downtime costs businesses an average of £3.6m a year, reaching an estimated £258,000 per hour. Meanwhile the estimated survival rate of companies without a disaster recovery plan is less than 10% – need we say more?

Backup servers and data centres are your digital safety net

Think of a backup server like a spare tyre for your business – a system that manages the backup of files, data, databases, or applications from your primary server. In the event of data loss or system failure, your backup server will pounce into action with copies of everything, enabling quick recovery and minimising downtime.

Hosting from multiple data centres can protect you, too. This can mitigate the risk of a single event taking you offline. However, a key factor to consider is the distance between them – more miles means more protection, but also more cost. When it comes to staying online through natural events like power outages, floods, or storms, 30 to 100 miles should see you right. 

Automatic backups to the rescue

The best kind of backup is one that happens without you realising. Enter: automatic backups – the ultimate proactive move to protect your files and data without any manual effort needed. When setting automatic backup intervals we recommend considering three options:

  • Daily: Creates copies of data every day, ensuring that a recent version of your data is always available.
  • Incremental: A quicker option that requires less storage, where only the changes made since the last backup are copied. 
  • Real-time AKA Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Automatically saves every change made to data, ensuring the latest version is always backed up.

How you set up your automatic backup should be informed by your budget, the storage you have available, and the demands of your website, for example:

  • Low-traffic sites: A blog page with minimal changes and sensitive data may only need weekly or monthly backups. 
  • Moderately active sites: E-commerce sites with regular changes and sensitive data would benefit from daily backups. 
  • High-traffic and dynamic sites: Larger online stores or news sites with constant updates and highly sensitive, large datasets should consider both real-time and incremental backups in tandem.

So how does this compare to your existing set up? Could your website recover from an outage or accidental website deletion in minutes?

Disaster recovery tools: Your business’ emergency button

In a nutshell, disaster recovery is your ability to restore your website with minimal downtime and data loss, ensuring smooth operations in times of crisis. You should have a set of DR tools that you can turn to should the worst happen…

  • Backup and recovery tools like the ones we’ve discussed above.
  • Replication and failover allow you to quickly switch to a secondary location or data centre when in times of crisis. 
  • Planning, testing, and monitoring tools can also help you prepare protocols so you know what to do under pressure, and test the effectiveness of your tools.

And the right hosting provider should make everything intuitive.

Finding a future-forward hosting provider

Future-proofing your business isn’t complicated if you know what to look for. A solid hosting provider should have your back, requiring minimal effort from you, and tailoring a solution to meet your unique business needs. 

Look out for specific features like ‘one-click restore’ or ‘instant failover’ that make recovery quick and painless. But also remember the broad strokes that indicate you’re with a provider you can trust, like 99.99% uptime guarantee, scalable security solutions, and enhanced disaster recovery services. All of which you’ll get right here at Fasthosts. 

Don’t just fail – fail-safe with Fasthosts

Want to make sure your website survives anything 2025 throws at it? Sleep easy in the knowledge that our UK data centres are ISO 27001 certified and boast the latest in hardware and software security – not to mention they run on 100% green energy.

Plus our on-site engineers monitor things 24/7 so you can focus on managing that first-class website of yours. Future-proof your business today – get in touch with our team.