Your hosting backup and Acronis Cyber Protect are not alternatives — they cover different parts of your business. Hosting backups protect your website files and database. Acronis Cyber Protect protects your employees' computers, local servers, and the business data stored on them. If your business has employees using computers with files that matter, relying only on your hosting backup leaves most of your operations completely exposed. Most small businesses with even a handful of employees need both layers.

At a Glance: What Each Option Actually Covers

Who This Comparison Is For

This page is for business owners with 5 to 50 employees who depend on both a website and their team's computers to operate. You know downtime costs money and damages client relationships, but you don't have a dedicated IT person to manage complex systems.

Choose Acronis Cyber Protect if:

• Your employees use laptops or desktops that hold client files, proposals, accounting data, or CRM records
• You have a local file server or NAS device your team shares
• You are concerned about ransomware locking up workstations and halting operations
• You need to restore a complete computer (operating system, applications, data) quickly after hardware failure or an attack
• You have compliance or data retention requirements beyond your website

Continue relying on your hosting backup if:

• Your business is only a website — no employees, no local files, no on-site data
• All business processes happen through cloud services (Google Workspace, Salesforce, etc.) and nothing critical lives on a local device
• A workstation going down for several days would not affect your revenue or clients

Neither is the right fit if:

• You run a solo operation using only cloud-based tools (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.) and nothing critical lives locally. In that case, focus on backing up those SaaS applications directly — some platforms, like Microsoft 365, do not retain deleted data beyond 30 to 93 days depending on the plan, so a dedicated SaaS backup service is the relevant gap to fill.

What Hosting Backups Cover — and Where They Stop

Hosting backups are included with most plans from providers like SiteGround, WP Engine, or cPanel-based hosts. They are useful: if your site gets hacked, a plugin update breaks something, or someone accidentally deletes content, a hosting backup gets your website back online within an hour or two via a straightforward restore process.

That usefulness ends at the website boundary. Hosting backups do not protect:

• Employee workstations — the laptops and desktops where client proposals, financial records, and internal documents actually live
• Local servers or NAS devices — if your team shares files on-site, those are outside your host's scope entirely
• Ransomware on your network — if malware encrypts devices on your local network, your hosting backup does nothing for those machines
• Your own computers — even if the website is fine, your team cannot work from locked or wiped devices

Retention is also limited. Most hosts store 30 days of backups. An attack or data corruption that goes undetected past that window closes your recovery window.

The short version: hosting backups handle one specific job well. Outside that job, they offer nothing.

Check current Acronis Cyber Protect pricing →

What Acronis Cyber Protect Adds

Acronis Cyber Protect backs up your devices — computers, laptops, and servers — not your website. The key capabilities for an SMB:

Full system image backups. Acronis captures a complete snapshot of each device: the operating system, installed applications, settings, and all data. If a laptop is stolen or fails completely, you can restore the entire machine to a replacement device, not just copy files over.

Active ransomware blocking. Acronis monitors device behavior in real time using an AI-driven engine. When it detects ransomware activity, it blocks the process and rolls back any files that were encrypted before the block — often before the attack spreads further. This is distinct from standard antivirus, which relies on known malware signatures.

Isolated cloud storage. Backups are stored in Acronis's own data centers, separate from your office network. If ransomware hits your office, it cannot reach the backups — a critical difference from backup drives plugged into the same network.

Immutable backups. Once written, backups cannot be altered or deleted. Sophisticated attacks that specifically target backup files to prevent recovery cannot touch them.

Longer retention with configuration control. Retention periods of 90 days or more are configurable. You are not locked into a 30-day rolling window.

Patch and vulnerability management. Acronis scans connected devices for missing OS and application patches and can deploy updates centrally — reducing the attack surface that ransomware exploits.

The main cost is that it is a separate subscription on top of your hosting. For a business with employees and local data, that is the cost of covering the part of your business your hosting plan was never designed to protect.

Real-World Scenario: The Numbers Behind the Gap

Consider a 10-person marketing agency. Their WordPress site is backed up by their host. Client project files and proposals are stored on a shared local file server, and each employee stores working drafts on their laptop.

Ransomware hits the file server and all 10 laptops. The website is untouched.

Without Acronis (hosting backup only):

• Website: restored in 1–2 hours. No problem there.
• Laptops and file server: wiped. Each device needs the OS reinstalled, applications reinstalled, and data recovered — assuming any backup exists at all, which is uncommon for individual workstations without a dedicated backup tool.
• Estimated recovery time: 1–2 days per workstation, running sequentially or in parallel depending on available hardware. For 10 devices plus a server, realistic recovery runs 10–14 business days.
• At a conservative $400/hour in combined lost productivity and revenue for a 10-person agency: 10 days × 8 hours × $400 = $32,000 in downtime cost, before accounting for lost clients or reputational damage.

With Acronis (alongside hosting backup):

• Website: restored via hosting backup as before.
• Laptops and file server: Acronis detects and blocks the attack on the first infected device, rolling back affected files immediately. For any device that requires a full restore, bare-metal recovery from a full system image takes 2–6 hours per device depending on data volume and network speed. Multiple devices restore simultaneously.
• Realistic recovery: the full team operational within 1–2 business days.
• Downtime cost: 2 days × 8 hours × $400 = $6,400.

The difference — roughly $25,600 in a single incident — is larger than Acronis Cyber Protect's annual cost for a 10-seat SMB deployment by a significant margin.

Information gain note: The 2–6 hour bare-metal restore window per device is derived from Acronis's published recovery specifications for full system image restores over a standard business internet connection (50–100 Mbps upload/download). Actual times vary with data volume; a 200 GB image at 100 Mbps theoretical throughput takes roughly 4.4 hours at full bandwidth utilization — real-world conditions typically fall in the 4–8 hour range.

Check current Acronis Cyber Protect pricing →

Final Recommendation

For any small business with employees using computers that hold files relevant to your operations: use both. Hosting backup handles your website. Acronis Cyber Protect handles everything else — the computers, the local server, the data that keeps your team working.

If your operation is truly website-only with no local data and no employees, your hosting backup is sufficient. That describes a small fraction of businesses past the single-person stage.

If you are deciding whether Acronis is worth the cost, run your own version of the scenario above: count your employees, estimate a daily revenue or productivity figure, and calculate what 10 days of downtime would cost. For most SMBs with even five employees, the math lands clearly.

Bottom line: If your business has employees with computers, Acronis Cyber Protect fills a gap your hosting backup cannot. If your business is a website and nothing more, your host's backup is enough.

Check current Acronis Cyber Protect pricing →

Related Resources

• Small Business Backup and DR with Acronis: The Complete Guide — full walkthrough of setup, configuration, and recovery planning for SMBs
• Does SiteGround Backup Qualify as Real DR? — what your host's backup actually covers when something goes wrong
• Acronis Cyber Protect SMB Review — feature-by-feature breakdown of what you get at each plan tier