Data Retention Policies for Your Website

In general, you shouldn’t plan on storing any personal data gathered through your website for an indefinite period of time. Thus, you should have a data retention policy and make adjustments so that any data your website collects is purged after a period of time. This information should also be reflected in your Privacy Policy.

What We Retain As Your Host

We retain the following information:

• File backups are made daily and kept for 7 days before being purged.
• Database backups are made three times a day, encrypted, and stored for a period of at least 30 days, but no longer than 90 days.

You may wish to include this information as part of your Privacy Policy, especially if you have a form which stores its data within your WordPress database. This data would be included in the backups that we make.

What You Retain as the Website Owner

Your website may retain information collected through third party utilities and plugins. You are responsible for this data. Some examples of data you may be retaining are:

• Google Analytics – If you use Google Analytics, you define in your account how long you wish to keep that data. Here is a help article from Google on how you can locate and change this setting.
• Contact Forms – We recommend and install Gravity Forms on all websites that we host. This help article shows how you can find and change the data retention setting for your installation. If you use another contact form plugin, it may not log and store any data by default. (For instance, Contact Form 7 does not unless you have an additional plugin installed and configured.) Check your individual plugin’s settings and make any necessary adjustments.
• Email Plugins – If you use a third party plugin to deliver emails, this plugin may be logging all sent emails. You may wish to disable this functionality, or switch to a different plugin.