A piece in DevOps.com argued that large organisations running mainframes (the very large, very old, very reliable computers that banks and insurers still run on) have grown complacent about recovery. The machines almost never fail, so nobody practises getting data back. The article's point is that a system being available is not the same as that system being recoverable.
You almost certainly do not have a mainframe. But the gap it describes is the same gap most small business websites sit in.
Here is what that looks like in practice. Your host takes nightly backups. Fine. Now answer these: how far back do those backups go, who can actually trigger a restore, how long does a restore take, and has anyone ever tried one? For a lot of businesses the honest answers are "not sure", "probably the developer", "no idea" and "no". A backup nobody has tested is a promise, not a plan.
The article also raises something worth borrowing. Modern attacks do not just hit the live system, they go after the login credentials and the backup copies at the same time. Scaled down to your situation: if your website backups live in the same hosting account as your website, and someone gets into that account, they can reach both. Same with a bookings system or a customer list held entirely inside one platform under one login.
What actually matters for a small business is usually less dramatic than a cyberattack. A plugin update breaks the site. A staff member deletes the wrong page. A hosting bill goes unpaid and the account suspends. In every one of those cases the question is the same: how quickly can we be back, and who does it?
What to do
Nothing urgent. Next time you speak to whoever looks after your site, ask three things: where the backups are stored, whether they are somewhere separate from the live site, and roughly how long a full restore would take. Write the answers down somewhere you will find them.
If nobody can answer, that is the finding. It is a cheap thing to fix before you need it and an expensive one after.
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