Quoted from other thread.

Originally posted by Aussie Bob
We as hosts are going to have to start looking very seriously at backup/mirroring solutions should a whole box go down like that.

This is to all hosts, I will soon be offering very affordable off-site backup. What that means is that you can upload your backup file off-site (out of your data center) to my backup server. You can choose to do this daily/weekly. We will also be doing daily backup on your data backup (hence, redundant backup) to our spare backup server to avoid any data failure. We will also consider weekly/daily on-site backup to our datacenter's tape backup.

Hence you get multiple redundancy:
1. High Speed Off site data backup to our servers
2. We backup your data backup to other servers (on-site)
3. We backup your data backup to on-site tape backup.

Will anybody be interested? I will work on the pricing for you, will make it as affordable as possible. Contact me if you are interested. Don't risk your client's data; why risking your hard work for years by not having multiple redundant backup solution?

cheers,
:beer:

Sounds like a good idea but I am curious about something. Most webhosts have a limited amount of bandwidth. If you were doing daily backups of a 20GB harddrive, in a 30-day month this would be 600GB of transfer. This is a lot more than most people get a month. Am I right about this or have you come up with a way where it is not a concern?

If you back up only files that have changed or are new, it'll decrease the amount you have to transfer. Transfer 20GB in the first day, and maybe 50-500MB a day after that. That's what we do, anyway, except it doesn't leave the network.

It's a good idea dektong. Hope it works out. :)

What I will suggest is to do daily backup on your second HD and an off-site weekly backup. We will do the redundancy after that.

Of course, you can gzip your backup file before you send it out for off-site backup; that way you will reduce your backup size.

cheers,
:beer:

Sounds like a good idea, let me know when you have more detailed pricing and service information :)

Cheers

I think it's a great idea. Backup is definitely one of the major concerns for a web host and backing up the data within the same data centre as the server does have obvious drawbacks.

You could make your services even more valuable, by offering a complete backup solution where the web host could be completely hands off. You would handle the installation of the scripts required to backup and upload the files on a monthly/daily basis as well as a solution which would completely restore a hardware failure (OS included). This would definitely be a blessing to any web host.

David Delisle