I'm a small company on not much budget providing websites and databases for charity and not-for-profit clients.
I have a few Debian Linux VPS servers and ensure I have daily backups to a different VPS than the one the service is hosted on.
Recently one of my hosting companies told me two drives failed simultaneously and so that data was lost forever. Stuff happens, they said sorry, what else could they do? But it made me wonder about cost-effective ways to basically get a VPS up again in the event of a hardware or other host-related failure.
Currently I would have to
- Spin up a new VPS
- Get the last day's backup (which includes databases, web root and website-specific config) over onto the VPS, and configure it like the last one etc.
- Update DNS and wait for it to propagate.
It would probably take a day or so achieve this, with the DNS propagation being a big unknown, although I have the TTL set quite low (hour or so).
Some hosts provide snapshots which can be used to replicate a set up to a new VPS, but there's still the IP and this doesn't help in the case that the host company cancels/suspends an account outright (I've been reading about this behaviour from certain hosting providers and it's scared me! I'm not doing anything spammy/dodgy and keep a close eye on security, but I realise that they literally have the power to do this and I'm quite risk averse).
Is this, combined with choosing reputable hosts, the best I can do without going for an incredibly expensive solution?
Best Answer
For me, choosing reputable hosts and doing regular backups - both of which you seem to be doing already - is about as well as you can do without starting to think about business continuity planning, high-availability setups, SLAs, and so on.
I tell people that you get 99% uptime for free (ie, without spending anything extra on high availability). That's about three and half days downtime a year. Every extra 9 on that uptime increases the cost by somewhere between three and ten times.
If people aren't ready to pay that kind of money, it is in my opinion a mistake to mislead them into thinking they can get any extra protection of any significance.