How to Back Up your Site in cPanel (Video Tutorial)

Here’s a quick video tutorial on backing up your self-hosted blog or website using the cPanel administration interface.

Required:

Hosting account with cPanel interface

Optional:

Addition FTP server for remote backup

YouTube made it a bit fuzzy, so I recommend full-screen viewing. If anyone has tips for getting YouTube to display closer to the original quality, please leave a comment below. Update: I’ve switched to Vimeo – the quality is considerably better.

How to Back Up your Site in cPanel from The Agitationist on Vimeo.

What Good Tech Support Looks Like

You may have noticed that I am a affiliate of web hosting company AN Hosting, since I pimp promote their services in a couple of places on this page. But in the words of Cy Sperling, the infamous founder of Hair Club for Men, “I’m also a client”. And as of today, I’m also a fan.

I host several domains on my account. One of these is bloglabs.net, a news aggregator for the blogging community. I haven’t had much time to put in on it, so yesterday I set to work. Almost immediately, I encountered a mysterious problem.

I set up the site to load quickly, so the only native image on the page is a thin blue stripe across the top. For some reason this tiny 4k image refused to load. I spent hours coding and re-coding the html and css, re-encoding and re-uploading the image, and getting more and more frustrated. I worked for years as a web designer, and I couldn’t get one lousy little gif to show up? It was downright embarrassing.

Finally I gave in to my lack of self-sufficiency, and at about 11:00 pm sent an email to AN’s tech support. Now, this image was purely decorative, so I didn’t mark the ticket as urgent, and I was not expecting a response until today. And quite frankly, my description of the issue was considerably less detailed than this post; nor did I inform them of the steps I had already taken to try and fix it.

Amazingly, I received a response within ten minutes. TEN MINUTES. If you’ve ever dealt with tech support of any kind, especially web hosting, it’s hard to describe how outstanding that is. I’ve had hosting companies take days to get to a routine problem like this.

The support rep (who is located in the United States, by the way) responded in grammatically-perfect English that he had re-built the image, and it was working on his end. He requested that I try it and report back. I felt as if I was communicating with a real person, who was actually taking my problem seriously. Hallelujah.

This was a logical first step, but he couldn’t have known that I already tried it, since I didn’t tell him. Tech support does require both sides to be communicative, and I wasn’t holding up my end. So I unfortunately had to report that the image still wasn’t displaying for me. Again, I did not expect a response until the following day.

And again I was pleasantly surprised when, about an hour later, they informed me they had found the problem. I was trying to link to the image across my hosted domains, but I had overzealously enabled “hotlink protection“, which only allows linking to a image from the same domain. Thus I had altered the mysterious .htaccess file, and was giving the server conflicting instructions.

Perhaps they found the problem by following the trail of smoke coming from the computer hosting my site, or by the robotic cries of “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”

But more likely, they patiently checked the many custom settings I had made in my admin interface until they found the culprit, tested and confirmed their theory, fixed it for me, and let me know everything was working perfectly.

Yes, they fixed it for me. They could have send me instructions, copied and pasted from somewhere, but no. They just fixed it.

And the tone of their emails was downright friendly. Not only did they solve the problem, they didn’t scold me about my error, like some support reps are prone to do. They simply included a helpful link regarding the use of hotlink protection, so I could use it appropriately in the future.

Finally, when I gratefully let them know it was working, they send back a friendly, non-boilerplate email that seemed genuinely happy to have the problem solved. It was 1:18 am.

It seems crazy to even have to point it out, but this is what good tech support looks like. If that isn’t what you’re getting, switch now. It’s $6.95 a month. The domain name is free. If you ask me, it’s a damn good deal.

p.s.: On the first sign-up page, scroll down and enter coupon code ”GOTAPEX-ROX-A-LOT” for 3 months free. Just don’t tell anyone else – this will be our little secret…

Why EveryBlock Rules the Neighborhood

Sometimes genius lies not in creating something, but in putting things together in a new way.

That’s the guiding principle behind the mashup – the assemblage of existing pieces into a new, derivative work. In the visual art world this is as old as collage; probably older. Video is another form well-suited to being mashed up, especially for comedic effect. And by now every one is aware that there are musician/DJs who do nothing but mashups.

In the 1950s William Burroughs borrowed his “cut-up” writing technique from the Surrealist découpage of the 1920s. Burroughs’ form consisted of writing a straight linear text, cutting it into pieces and rearranging it to discover new and surprising possibilities. This was a clever trick to generate ideas that might not spring up when the conscious and ego were busy getting in the way.

On the web though, mashups usually have the reverse intent. Instead of breaking down information to create new meanings, the web mashup aggregates data points with the purpose of finding the meanings and relationships hidden within.

Ever since Google Maps opened up its code for developers to play with, the web mashup world has exploded. More recently, tools such as Yahoo Pipes have opened up the possibility for non-developers to match up multiple sets of data in revealing ways.

All of which is a preface to explain why I love everyblock.com. Without that intro, it might sound rather uninteresting that the site aggregates publicly available information such as crime stats, building permits, and restaurant reviews, connects them geographically and allows the user to subscribe to a local feed. OK, it still sounds uninteresting.

Try this. How would you like to be notified automatically that the restaurant down the block failed its latest health department inspection? Would it be valuable for you to know that your neighbor was just issued a liquor license? How about a new real estate listing down the street, or a new foreclosure auction around the corner? Would it help you to know about what crimes are reported in your neighborhood? How about automatically receiving nearby business reviews? Maybe you’d like to know whenever a new photo is geo-tagged in your area on Flickr? Or when a crew is coming to film on your block, or a street is being closed off, or when a new bike rack has been installed?

Now, map all of those together, and have them automatically delivered to you as a feed. This is the beauty of everyblock.com. It’s like the old lady with all the neighborhood gossip, except that everything is factual (and it doesn’t judge).

And it is so incredibly easy to use. Just put in your address, zip code, neighborhood name, ward number, whatever you prefer, and click “Search”. Once you’re done admiring the results, click either “Custom RSS Feeds” or “Email Alerts”, choose which info you’d like in your alerts, and you’re done.

You are now that little old lady who knows everything. Thanks Everyblock!

As of now, EveryBlock is only available in 11 cities: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Washington DC. The team behind it consists of a mere six people, and they are not a division of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. How about showing them some support by spreading the word?