Keep Backups!!

OK, I figured I'd just come out and say it since I've seen it too much in this industry, important data being lost and there being no backups. I will be using this post to outline the backup services we do provide, as well as extra measures you can take. In short, a web server is similar to your home computer in that things can happen, hardware issues, software quirks, hacking, etc. that can result in data loss. These incidents may be rare, but if your data is important to you, you need to be prepared and should always keep a backup.

Shared Hosting - Our shared hosting accounts are backed up nightly to our local backup servers, this is in addition to the RAID configuration already on the systems, which protects us from drive failure. These backups protect us from any data corruption that may happen, and these are the backups that were restored with the recent issue on web4, which then resulted in minimal data loss. In addition, we keep regular off-site backups of all of our internal systems, in case there is a catastrophic event here at the data center. Though it is unlikely, we would rather be safe than sorry. While this does protect you from most cases of data loss, you still need to take some responsibility. Our backups are only kept for a maximum of one week. That means if you lose any data due to an accidental deletion of your own, an insecurely written script, an account being deleted for a billing issue, any form of hacking, or any other similar method of data loss you will need to notice the loss and have us restore that data within a matter of days, otherwise the data will no longer be in our backups. With us working together there should be little risk of complete data loss, but remember, backups are only made once a day, so if you are uploading and/or changing something important you may want to keep a local backup for at least 48 hours.

VPS & Cloud Accounts - We do not proactively backup VPS accounts, but there is a backup feature in each VPS and cloud account that will allow you to make one complete backup of your VPS. This backup can easily be made and restored directly from your control panel. The backup made is then stored on a completely separate VPS server, so even in the case of your VPS node failing completely the backup would still be available. If you need to keep more than one backup we would encourage you to use one of our backup plans.

Dedicated Servers - No proactive backups are made of dedicated servers by default, even on fully managed servers, though all dedicated servers do have backup space available an additional cost. To use this backup space, just Contact Us to have your account setup and then work with our support department if you need any assistance getting that working. It is relatively simple to keep regularly scheduled backups using our backup accounts along with rsync.

As you can see, in VPS and dedicated server accounts you are full responsible for making sure backups are kept, but we will be more than happy to assist you to make sure backups are kept. Now I am hoping this has helped some of you understand the importance of backups and can now see clearly the service and assistance we provide so you can keep up-to-date backups.