Question Small business site on Plesk, what is your simple backup, email and SSL checklist?

[Kacey Noms]

Hi everyone, I am Kacey, a letting agent based in Birmingham. Our agency website runs on Plesk, and I am not very technical, I just need the site to work reliably because landlords and tenants use it every day to contact us and view listings.

I have had three small problems already, and I would love a simple checklist from people who do this properly:

1. Backups, how often do you back up a small business site, and do you keep a copy off the server as well?
2. Email, after moving our domain, some of our emails to landlords started going to spam. I have checked SPF and DKIM, what else should a non-technical owner check first?
3. SSL, we had a certificate auto-renew fail once and did not notice for a day. How do you keep an eye on expiry without checking it manually every week?

I do not need anything fancy, just the basic routine you would tell a small business owner who cannot afford downtime. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[King555]

1. I make daily (incremental) backups to an external SFTP storage via Plesk (automatically, of course).
2. I recommend this tool for checking: Domain Health Check - Online Domain Tools - Blacklist, Email, Website, DNS - MxToolBox
3. I use this tool: Red Sift Certificates Lite | Free Certificate Monitoring

 

[tessa67]

Hi Kacey,

King555's answer covers the basics well.

A few additions:

1. Backups

• Keep the daily off-server backup, and set a retention period (e.g. 7-14 days).
• Enable the e-mail notification for failed backups (Tools & Settings > Backup Manager > Scheduled Backup Settings).
• Do a test restore once. An untested backup is not a backup.
• Make sure mail is included, not only the website files.

2. E-Mail (landlords' mails going to spam)

• Add a DMARC record (start with p=none and a reporting address), SPF and DKIM alone are often not enough.
• Check that the reverse DNS (PTR) of the server IP matches the mail server hostname.
• After a domain move, remove old leftovers in DNS (old SPF includes, old MX or A records).
• Check whether the server IP is on a blacklist (MXToolbox) and send a test mail to mail-tester.com.
• If you mail Gmail/Outlook recipients a lot, register with Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS.

3. SSL

• Tools & Settings > Notifications: enable alerts for certificate problems.
• Use an external uptime monitor that also checks SSL expiry (e.g. UptimeRobot or the tool mentioned above), so you get an e-mail before the certificate runs out.
• Let's Encrypt renewal needs port 80 reachable from outside, so do not block it in the firewall or redirect it in an odd way.

An uptime monitor for the website itself (every 5 minutes) is also worth setting up, it costs nothing and tells you about downtime before your customers do.

Regards
Tessa