Running a Name Portfolio
Backup: A Copy of the Site Is Not a Copy of the Name
You have backups of the site and no record at all of who holds the name or what the zone used to say.
The short answer
A backup is a copy of files and database that can genuinely be restored. It protects the site. It does not protect the name: no restore recreates a registration, revives a zone that was deleted along with a registrar account, or produces an auth code you no longer hold.
So a name-holder keeps two things. The hosting copy, which here is automatic, daily and restorable from your own panel. And a short written record of the registrar, the expiry date, the nameservers and the zone as exported.
The second one is a text file. It is also the one people discover they never made.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
100+
Terms in the domain glossary
2 min
Typical read
Plain
English, apex to zone file
24/7
Someone on the desk
The adjectives on a good backup are familiar enough — automatic, so remembering never enters into it; offsite, so it survives the server it protects; tested, because somebody has restored from one for real; deep, because retention has to reach past a problem you noticed late. Add one more for names: separable. A copy that exists only inside the account it protects goes when the account goes, and an account can go for billing reasons as easily as technical ones.
The zone export is the part worth insisting on. Rebuilding a site from a copy is a known job. Rebuilding a zone from memory is guesswork, and the records people forget are the invisible ones — SPF, a DKIM selector, a verification TXT, the MX priority. Those break mail rather than the website, so nobody notices until a customer says nothing came back.
Two assets, two different copies
The website is files and data, and it is covered by the daily account copy. The name is a registration and a zone, and it is covered by nothing your host does automatically. Treating them as one thing is how people end up holding a perfect copy of a site they can no longer publish at its own address.
Neither copy is expensive. One is included with the plan; the other is a text file you update when something changes.
What the zone export has to contain
Every A and AAAA record with its TTL. Every CNAME. Every MX with its priority — priorities are the field most often lost, and a wrong one delivers mail to the backup route indefinitely. Every TXT record, which means the SPF, the DKIM selector, the DMARC policy and any verification strings a third-party service asked you to add.
Export it whole rather than transcribing it. A copy-and-paste of the zone as the panel presents it is worth more than a tidy summary somebody typed out, because the tidy summary is where the DKIM selector goes missing.
The registrar record, written down once
Which registrar holds the name. The expiry date. Whether the transfer lock is on. Which email address the registrant contact uses, and whether anybody still reads it. Whether auto-renewal is on and against which card. None of that is in a hosting backup and all of it decides whether the name is still yours next year.
For a name held on behalf of a client, add one more line: who the registrant actually is. That is the field that matters on the day the relationship ends.
Restoring, and the delegation you have to redo
A restore onto the same account changes nothing about DNS, so the name keeps working. A restore onto a different server does not — the records still point at the old address, and the site is only reachable once the delegation catches up. That is the moment you will wish you had lowered the TTL beforehand.
Read on: Database, Staging Environment, Cron Job and Uptime.
Every plan takes a copy of the account daily, and the restore runs from your own panel.
Why a hundred domain terms were worth writing down
Jargon is what turns a five-minute change into a lost week. This is the domain desk's own reference, published where a search engine can hand it to you instead of us.
Every plan takes a copy of the account daily, and the restore runs from your own panel.
- Plain English, from apex to zone file
- What the registry does, and when it does it
- The failure mode named in every entry
- Maintained by our own domain desk
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Registry, registrar and host kept apart
Every entry says which of the three actually holds the setting, because that is the question hiding behind most domain problems.
The clock, given in days
Locks, grace periods, redemption windows and TTLs stated as durations, since duration is what decides whether your change has landed.
Where the record really lives
Registrar panel, DNS zone, server config or the site's own database — named explicitly, so you change it once instead of three times.
The name, backed up separately
What belongs in a zone export, what belongs in the registrar note, and why neither is inside your hosting copy.
The failure mode, named
Each entry ends on how it goes wrong: the stranded mailbox, the lapsed name, the record that quietly never propagated.
Entries that point onwards
Related terms cross-link, so one lookup turns into working knowledge of a whole zone rather than a single answer.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find out which system holds it
Open your client area and your DNS panel side by side. Half of all domain confusion is simply not knowing whether a setting sits at the registrar, in the zone, or in the site's own configuration.
- 2
Read the clock before you change anything
Note the record's TTL and the name's expiry date. One decides how long your change takes to matter; the other decides how long you still have a name to change.
- 3
Read the neighbours
Database, Cron Job and Uptime finish this one, each a two-minute read.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- The renewal figure stays the one you registered at
- Names held in your own name for the term you have paid for
- A name free to move to any registrar once the standard 60-day window has passed
- Auto-renewal switched off with a toggle in the account, with no phone call
- Plan changes applied in place, with no migration
- Thirty days' money back on hosting plans, seven on reseller
- No set-up charge and no joining fee, at any point
- A person on the support desk at any hour of any day
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- WebP image optimisation built in at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
Does a hosting backup include my DNS records?
No. The account copy covers the files and databases inside your hosting account. The zone lives with whoever runs your nameservers and the registration lives with your registrar, so neither is inside the account and neither comes back with a restore. Export the zone separately and keep that export somewhere the hosting account cannot take down with it.
If I lose access to the registrar account, can a backup get the name back?
No backup can. Recovery there is a matter of the registrar's own identity checks, which is why the registrant contact address and the account's own recovery details matter more than any copy of the site. Keep both current, keep a written note of which registrar holds each name, and treat the name as a separate asset from the site sitting on it.
What should I keep in writing about each name?
Registrar, expiry date, lock status, auto-renewal state, the registrant contact address and who the registrant legally is. Then the zone as exported, complete with TTLs, MX priorities and every TXT record. That fits on one page per name and is the thing nobody has when they need it.
How often is the account copied, and can I restore it myself?
Daily, on every plan, and yes — the restore runs from your own panel in minutes: files, databases or both, at three in the morning with no ticket queue in the way. Keeping a further copy somewhere entirely separate is still a sound habit, and nothing here prevents you taking one.
Keep reading
Web Hosting
cPanel hosting on NVMe drives, with SSL, the migration and year one of the name included.
Domain Names
Search, register and transfer names — year one free with annual hosting.
Changing provider? Work through this checklist beforehand.
A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Get the record where it belongs.
Transfer in and the remaining registration term carries over, with DNS resolving the whole way through.
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