Almost every hosting company advertises automatic backups. It sounds reassuring, and usually it is even accurate, something really is being stored. Even so, this is one of the most underestimated assumptions in running a WordPress site.
Two different promises
“We make backups” is a promise about a process. “This backup works” is a promise about an outcome. Those are not the same thing, even though they feel the same right up until the moment you actually need the backup.
A backup can be created neatly every single day and still turn out to be unusable the moment you try to restore it. An incomplete database dump, a corrupted file, a backup that contains the site but not the database. None of this is visible until it goes wrong.
Another point that often gets overlooked
Backups stored on the same server as the website share the same risk. A compromised account, a server failure, or a mistake by the hosting company itself can take out both the site and the backup. A backup stored independently of the website, with no credentials living on the site itself, prevents exactly that scenario.
The only way to know for sure
Do not ask, test. Restore a full backup for real once, files and database, and measure how long it takes and whether it works. That is not distrust of your hosting company, it is simply the difference between assuming and knowing.
I did this myself, on my own sites, before ever recommending it to anyone else. Since then I have done it for a client as well: a full restore onto a separate test environment, files and database, thirty minutes, everything intact. That is precisely the kind of certainty “our host makes backups” can never give you, however reassuring it sounds.