Recovery Guide
Hosting with daily backups — A backup is judged by how long the restore takes, not by whether it exists
You would be devastated to lose the site, which puts you in the majority — so the useful question is not whether copies are being taken but how much time and data a bad afternoon would actually cost you.
The short answer
A plan where the daily copy runs unattended and restoring is a single click from your own panel — Turbo at $4.66 a month — moving up to a shorter interval when a store or a busy site makes a day's data too much to lose.
Decide it with two numbers borrowed from anyone who runs systems for a living. How much data can you afford to lose, measured in hours? And how long can you afford to be broken while it comes back? Everything else on this page follows from those two answers.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
NVMe
NVMe storage, every tier
Free
Domain, first year
99.9%
Uptime target, monitored
Flat
Renewal, unchanged
The great majority of data loss is self-inflicted: a bungled update, a badly written plugin, a directory deleted in a hurry. Almost none of it is dramatic, and almost all of it is recoverable within minutes if the platform is set up for it.
Which is why speed of recovery matters far more than whether a copy exists somewhere. A nightly copy you can restore yourself in five minutes beats an hourly copy that requires a ticket and an office hour, every single time.
Set the two numbers before you compare plans
Write both down, in hours, before looking at a single feature grid:
Acceptable data loss. If the site changes once a week, a daily copy is generous. If you take fifty orders a day, losing twenty-four hours means losing fifty orders and fifty customer relationships.
Acceptable downtime. This is the one people never estimate, and it is the number that rules out any provider whose restores go through a ticket queue during office hours.
Once both are written down, the plan comparison takes about a minute: intervals shorter than your loss tolerance, restores faster than your downtime tolerance, and nothing else matters.
What the intervals actually are here
Daily backups run on every plan with self-service restores from the panel — files, databases, or both, at three in the morning with no queue in front of you.
Nitro on the standard shared range takes a copy every 6 hours, with Imunify360 in front. Nitro WordPress and Nitro Store shorten that to every 4 hours specifically to compress the exposure window as order volume rises.
A restore itself is a matter of minutes: choose the date in the panel and select files, databases or both. In nearly every real incident the slow part is realising a restore is needed, not performing it.
Rehearse one, because an untested backup is a hypothesis
Do this once, deliberately, on a staging copy rather than during an incident. Restore last night's database into staging, load the site, and check that the content is what you expected. Time the whole thing.
That figure is your real recovery time, and it is almost always shorter than people fear and longer than they assume. Either way it is now a known quantity rather than an article of faith.
While you are there, confirm the copies are held away from the machine they exist to rescue. A snapshot living on the same disk as the site solves the mistake case and not the hardware case, and for anything irreplaceable a second independent copy is simply sound practice.
Check the terms as carefully as the interval
Ask what retention depth is kept, because last night's copy alone cannot reach behind a problem that developed slowly — a corrupted table that has been wrong for a week needs history, not recency.
Ask support to describe the restore process before you buy and time the reply: 2 hours is the target, 1 hour when a site is down. HostingFast is a trading name of Vitalcare at Home Ltd, registered in England and Wales, on the public record, and hosting plans carry a 30-day money-back window.
The metric is recovery, not the copy
Every host lists backups. Very few tell you how long a restore takes or who is allowed to start one, which is the difference between an inconvenience and a bad week.
Every plan ships with a free SSL certificate that renews itself ahead of expiry — the padlock is never something you have to remember.
- Data-loss and downtime tolerances written down first
- Self-service restores, no ticket queue
- A rehearsed restore, timed on staging
- Renewal charged at the order rate
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Self-service restores from your panel
Files, databases or both, chosen by date and started by you at three in the morning without a ticket in the way.
Daily on every plan, tighter above
Every 6 hours on Nitro, and every 4 hours on Nitro WordPress and Nitro Store where order data raises the stakes.
Turbo is this page's answer
$4.66 a month for 20 GB of NVMe, 25 sites and 1 TB of bandwidth, with the daily copy running unattended.
Imunify360 on the Nitro tiers
Shorter intervals paired with active protection, which shortens both the exposure window and the odds of needing it.
Staging to rehearse on
Restore into a staging copy and time it, so your recovery figure is measured rather than hoped for.
A custodian you can identify
Vitalcare at Home Ltd, registered in England and Wales — worth checking before a supplier holds the only copy of anything.
Prices Side by Side
Our numbers next to the big names
Typical intro and renewal pricing across the market, lined up against ours — including the renewal figure most comparison charts skip.
| Feature | HostingFastMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Cheapest plan renews at its sign-up price | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the cheapest tier | ||||
| Daily backups from the first tier | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*Our number is the lowest-priced plan we sell on an annual term, pulled live from the same catalogue that powers our pricing page — it physically cannot fall out of date. The other three columns show the ranges shared hosts in each bracket typically advertise: introductory offers that mostly demand a one-to-four-year commitment, then jump once it expires. We no longer name rivals or print their prices, because a figure we cannot verify on the day you read it has no business on this page. Line us up against whichever host you are really weighing — and give the renewal row the hardest look.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Write down both tolerances in hours
How much data you can lose, and how long you can be broken. Two numbers, and the plan comparison collapses to a minute's work.
- 2
Rehearse a restore into staging
Last night's database into a staging copy, on a quiet day, timed. That is your genuine recovery figure and it takes twenty minutes to establish.
- 3
Match the interval to what an hour costs
Daily is generous for a site that changes weekly. At fifty orders a day the four-hourly interval on the Nitro tiers is the specification that answers the arithmetic.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- Daily backups on every plan, taken without anyone remembering
- Self-service restores from the panel: files, databases or both
- Backups every 6 hours on Nitro, with Imunify360 in front
- Backups every 4 hours on Nitro WordPress and Nitro Store
- Retention with depth, so you can reach behind a slow-developing fault
- Staging copies to rehearse a restore on before you need one
- A full account backup downloadable at any time, including during cancellation
- NVMe SSD storage behind a LiteSpeed cache on every tier
- Human support on duty every hour of every day
- Money-back cover: 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
How long does a restore actually take?
Minutes. Choose the date in the panel and restore files, databases or both together. In nearly every real incident the slow part is realising a restore is needed at all. Rehearse one into staging on a quiet day and time it, and you will have a real figure instead of an assumption.
How do I decide between daily and four-hourly backups?
Work out what an hour of lost data costs at your current volume. A site that changes once a week is well covered by a daily copy. At fifty orders a day, a lost day is fifty orders and fifty customer relationships, and the four-hourly interval on the Nitro WordPress and Nitro Store tiers is what answers that.
Should I run a backup plugin as well?
For anything irreplaceable, two independent copies is sound practice. The platform snapshots cover the platform layer and restore fastest; an offsite plugin copy covers the scenarios that keep careful people awake, including losing access to the account itself. A second copy costs pennies; recreating five years of work does not.
How much retention depth do I need?
Enough to reach behind a problem that developed slowly. Last night's copy handles the deleted directory perfectly and is useless against a table that has been quietly corrupt for a week. Ask any provider for the retention depth alongside the interval — the two questions belong together.
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Know your recovery time before you need it.
Daily copies on every plan, four-hourly on the Nitro tiers, restores you run yourself, and a flat renewal figure.
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