what are you guys looking for in a remote backup solution that you canbackup to at an outside data center for complete security?

how much space / price points etc?

interested to see what the needs are out there.

stage 1: partion on first hd (free)
stage 2: second hd on hd for backup (cost of 2nd hd)
stage 3: another server in same datacenter (cost of other server)
stage 4: another server in a different datacenter (cost of server)
stage 5: multiple servers across multiple datacenters (expensive)

They all have their prices. Most hosts find 3-4 to be good. 5 is for mission critical hosting that has to have 100% or near 100%uptime which requires quick changing dns lots of redundancy and is expensive.

Well, if you only have 1 server, probably a second HDD will do you just fine, plus you dont use up any of your data transfer limit when backing up to your 2nd HDD, but you will use up system power.

Rsync is a good way to do remote backups without using up all your bandwidth.

Transfer all your software once, then run rsync every night and it will only update changes on the backup server.

Also, on the backup server, you should be copying nightly backups to a seperate directory, and maybe keep 7 days worth of backups. Why? Because, say your backup server runs rsync at 2AM every morning. Well one night, at 1AM your main server gets hacked, and a bunch of stuff is deleted. An hour later, your backup server rsync's and makes an identical copy on itself, meaning it'll delete everything locally that's not on the main server.

This is why you need to have other backups that rsync doesn't touch on the backup server.

Well, im thinking about getting a server with a 2nd HD for backups, so are you saying that it would be best to make a partition on my main HD, make a backup there, then another main backup moves to the 2nd HD?

how much space do you think you would need for an offsitebackup and how much isyour pricepoint?

You may want to charge by the gig or something -- backup requirements will vary wildly and change over time.

Take a glance at this for how much space you will need probably in a 2nd HD: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=218391

As for price for a 2nd HD, well it ranges from host to host. SM offers a 40 GB for $30/month. Their Backup SOlutions for 40 GB is more expensive.

so what would be a price that would be widely accepted as a great solution for an offsite backupsite - in per gig per month of space - with no metering on it?


for example - if you had a server at ev1 and wanted to backup to another server somewhere else - how much space do you think you would need for a cron ftb backup and how much is a great price per month (of course it will need to be reasonable for a provder to make some money - but will need to bel low enough to attract the business to it from offsite data cneter)

I'm personally going to get a backup server at ServerMatrix while using a colo'd server in DV2. Both are pretty inexpensive, so backing up will be secure and easy.

I don't want a second HD incase the entire server blows, and another one in the same DC could cause problems if there was a fire or something!

Originally posted by sailor
so what would be a price that would be widely accepted as a great solution for an offsite backupsite - in per gig per month of space - with no metering on it?I think that a backup account with no metering on it would be very foolish - If someone has no limit on their bandwidth, they'll backup to the account as much as possible. I could see offering space by the gig with no bandwidth limit from servers in the same DC (If you're the DC owner, such as your company), but in terms of offering your services to outside clients, you'll need the bandwidth. In terms of space, you really can't oversell it - If someone buys enough space to hold a weeks worth of backups, most likely, they'll be using all of that space at one time or another.

Depending on the cost that you need to cover, I'd say you could charge:

Between $1 and $4 per gig of space needed.
Between $0.25 and $0.50 per GB of transfer needed

That's a large range, but that's what I'd consider reasonable for offsite backups, depending on your cost of running the server.

Offsite backups are much better than just getting a second harddrive, as if your server is breached, a hacker won't have any problem getting onto that second backup drive and trashing your backups.

-Josh

Josh,

Suck is free for all large hosing providers. He is not asking what he can charge, what he is asking is what an average dedicated server owner would need and what price would make him buy the account 'yesterday'.

Paul

With all the budget hosts out there right now it's pretty easy to pick up a server for under $70. You obviously don't need anything very beefy in the way of hardware, or even very speedy in the way of network speed. For a backup solution to cost more than $50-$70 might have a tough time taking off...

yes - our inbound bandwidth is virtually unused - so bandwidth does not concern me. its more of the administration of the hardware and the ooccasional outgoing restore bandwidth.

you will not abuse the backup due to the fact you will have to pay your existing data center for the backup outgoing traffic to us. I simply wnat to know what price would make you buy yesterday as rusko says and how much space on average people would need. thanks!



Originally posted by Joshua
I think that a backup account with no metering on it would be very foolish - If someone has no limit on their bandwidth, they'll backup to the account as much as possible. I could see offering space by the gig with no bandwidth limit from servers in the same DC (If you're the DC owner, such as your company), but in terms of offering your services to outside clients, you'll need the bandwidth. In terms of space, you really can't oversell it - If someone buys enough space to hold a weeks worth of backups, most likely, they'll be using all of that space at one time or another.

Depending on the cost that you need to cover, I'd say you could charge:

Between $1 and $4 per gig of space needed.
Between $0.25 and $0.50 per GB of transfer needed

That's a large range, but that's what I'd consider reasonable for offsite backups, depending on your cost of running the server.

Offsite backups are much better than just getting a second harddrive, as if your server is breached, a hacker won't have any problem getting onto that second backup drive and trashing your backups.

-Josh

bump - thoughts?

I want any drive backed up to be a complete mirror. I also want the ability to restore either all or part.

That being said, if price were not an object, I would probably prefer something like a Veritas solution.

Simplest of solutions would be to provide a solid and proven rsync type solution.

I have been searching for the ideal solution, but it doesn't appear to be offered yet. My ideal would be to back up on the server to a second drive (using Control Panel software), then to copy that drive to a remote server or tape. Whereas the backup to the second drive is nightly, the remote doesn't necessarily have to be, although nightly is still preferable. With an excellent backup solution (like veritas) then the backup to the second drive could be eliminated.

Originally posted by sailor
how much space do you think you would need for an offsitebackup and how much isyour pricepoint? I would like to be able to backup each server for $50/month. That would be my target price point. The amount of space depends on the software used and the amount of compression. Most of my servers have 80 GB primary hard drives, some have up to 200, some as low as 40. I see $0.50 per GB of backup space as an average.

im thinking about getting a server with a 2nd HD for backups

A secondary hd is not a good solution. One of our servers were just visited by a hacker and index files in many accounts were defaced. The problem is that many index files in the daily, weekly and monthly backup accounts were defaced as well, so we couldn't restore them from there. Now we're looking for a remote backup solution.

John

My ideal would be to back up on the server to a second drive (using Control Panel software), then to copy that drive to a remote server or tape.

That would be a great solution! By the way I'm a customer of yours so hope that you'll consider the feedback from your market ;)

John

I would expect to pay around $50 or less - for up to 80 gigs. It should be considerably cheaper than a dedicated server, because you could put many backup clients on one box. Having said that, I think maybe $30 per month is more reasonable. $30 is the price that would make me buy yesterday.

I be very interested in a solution that has unlimited (within reason) space but you pay for bandwidth used. That seems to be a fair way to handle it!

And if you are setting this up as a server backup business, I would expect help and scripts to make it happen.