When choosing business web hosting, most companies assume that “daily backups” means complete data protection. However, the industry-standard 30-day backup retention creates a dangerous gap in data safety that many businesses only discover when it’s too late. Farbyte’s Business Cloud hosting addresses this critical vulnerability with an extended historical safety net that protects your data for up to six months, not just 30 days.
The Hidden Limitation of 30-Day Backup Windows
Traditional shared hosting providers typically maintain a rolling 30-day backup window. This means yesterday’s backup replaces the one from 31 days ago, creating a continuously moving window of protection. Whilst this sounds reasonable on paper, it exposes businesses to several critical risks that standard retention policies cannot address.
Consider a realistic scenario: your website is compromised by malware on day 15 of the month, but the infection is subtle – perhaps injecting hidden spam links or slowly modifying files. You might not notice the problem until day 45, when Google flags your site or customers report suspicious behaviour. By this point, every backup in your 30-day window contains the infected files. With standard retention, you have no clean restore point, leaving you with the expensive task of manually cleaning malware or rebuilding your entire site from scratch.
The same vulnerability applies to accidental deletions. Perhaps a team member removes what they believe is an outdated product category, only to realise two months later that it contained valuable customer testimonials or essential product documentation. With 30-day retention, that data is permanently lost.
Why Historical Depth Matters for Business Continuity
Farbyte’s Business Cloud hosting employs a tiered retention strategy that provides genuine long-term protection. The system maintains 10 daily snapshots for immediate recovery, 4 weekly archives for medium-term safety, and 6 monthly backups that extend your safety net to approximately six months. This approach recognises that data loss incidents don’t always reveal themselves immediately.
This extended retention proves invaluable in numerous business situations. Database corruption that occurs gradually over weeks becomes recoverable. Content that was removed during a website redesign three months ago can be retrieved. Customer data that was accidentally purged during a CRM migration remains accessible. The peace of mind that comes from knowing your business has six months of recoverability, rather than just 30 days, transforms backup from a basic safety measure into genuine business continuity insurance.
Beyond RAID: Triple-Replicated Distributed Storage
Standard business hosting typically relies on RAID 10 mirroring, where data is duplicated across drives within a single physical server. Whilst this protects against individual drive failures, it creates a single point of failure at the server level. If that server experiences motherboard failure, power supply issues, or data centre connectivity problems, your website goes offline until hardware replacement completes.
Farbyte’s infrastructure uses triple-replicated distributed storage, where your data exists simultaneously across three separate physical servers. This architecture, similar to enterprise-grade systems like Ceph, provides self-healing capabilities that standard RAID configurations cannot match. If one storage node fails completely, your website continues operating without interruption whilst the system automatically rebuilds data on a replacement node. This resilience ensures that your business remains online even during hardware failures that would cause downtime with traditional hosting.
The True Cost of Data Loss
Industry research consistently demonstrates that data loss creates financial impact far beyond the immediate recovery costs. Small businesses experiencing significant data loss face an average of £50,000 in recovery expenses, lost productivity, and missed revenue. For many companies, losing two months of customer communications, order history, or content development represents an existential threat.
The question isn’t whether extended backup retention costs more – it’s whether the marginal cost difference justifies the exponentially greater protection. When a single data loss incident can cost tens of thousands of pounds, investing in hosting that provides six months of recoverability rather than 30 days becomes a straightforward risk management decision.
Dedicated Resources That Support Real Business Performance
Extended backup retention only matters if your hosting infrastructure can support actual business operations. Farbyte’s Business Cloud plans provide 8GB to 20GB of dedicated RAM and 4 to 16 CPU cores, specifications typically reserved for VPS hosting. This includes dedicated Redis and Elasticsearch memory allocations (128MB to 1024MB) that accelerate database queries and search functionality – features that standard shared hosting either doesn’t offer or charges extra to enable.
This combination of enterprise-grade backup retention and VPS-level resources creates hosting that genuinely supports business growth, not just basic website operation. Your team can run resource-intensive applications, handle traffic spikes during marketing campaigns, and maintain fast page loads for customers without worrying about hitting the restrictive limits common to standard shared hosting.
Commercial Terms That Reflect Long-Term Partnership
Farbyte’s approach extends beyond technical specifications to commercial relationship structure. Business Cloud hosting includes a lifetime free domain (.uk or .com), eliminating the recurring £15+ annual renewal fees that competitors charge after the first year. The service operates on flexible monthly billing with no contracts, allowing businesses to scale up or down based on actual needs rather than being locked into lengthy commitments.
These terms reflect a fundamental difference in philosophy: hosting should be a partnership that grows with your business, not a contract that extracts maximum revenue through hidden fees and restrictive terms.
Making the Right Choice for Your Business Data
When evaluating business hosting options, the backup retention policy deserves equal consideration alongside storage space and bandwidth. A 30-day backup window might seem adequate until you experience the scenario it cannot address – and by then, the limitation becomes a crisis rather than a specification to compare.
Farbyte’s Business Cloud hosting recognises that genuine data protection requires historical depth, resilient infrastructure, and resources that support real business operations. The six-month backup retention, triple-replicated storage, and dedicated computing resources create a foundation for business continuity that standard 30-day retention simply cannot match.
Your business data represents years of accumulated value: customer relationships, content development, transaction history, and operational knowledge. Protecting that investment requires hosting infrastructure designed for genuine safety, not just meeting minimum industry standards.
Protect your business today with Farbyte Business Hosting.