From time to time, you may log into your site’s admin area and see a notification that Joomla! core or extension updates are available. It’s extremely important that updates are applied promptly as they often address bugs in previous releases or patch security holes that could let hackers in to your site, but you don’t need to take any action to apply the updates yourself: we will do this as part of the package on all the sites we host and maintain.

Caution

It’s important that updates are applied promptly, but there are also some risks in applying updates immediately the notification appears: sometimes updates don’t work properly or cause conflicts with other extensions, and occasionally they can bring down the whole site. For this reason, we normally apply updates to our own sites first and then to clients’ sites once we know they’re safe. If the notification doesn’t disappear immediately, it doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten – we’re just waiting until we're sure it's safe to proceed.

Zipfish has a pro subscription to this utility, and it’s installed free of charge on all the sites we build and maintain. Once it’s up and running, it takes just a couple of clicks to make a backup of the whole site and its database, and the result is a single file that can be uploaded and restored to the same or a new server with the help of Akeeba’s Kickstart utility.

The generated backup file is stored with the website’s files on the server, so obviously any failure involving destruction of the site’s files would also destroy the backup. To guard against this eventuality, we download and archive backups when sites are first launched, and from time to time we make and download further backups as an additional security measure (though this is not officially included in the hosting and support package and the existence of a current backup is therefore not guaranteed).