Hi,
I have a "fedora" dedicated server. I will use it for selling hosting accounts and use for my own websites. But the maintanance makes me fear.

Even i have linux experience i am not familiar about hosting business. So i am afraid of loosing my clients datas or make their site unreachable. So i would like to know the key points about maintanance like backup etc. Which files do we need to backup and how occational and with which tools? And some other questions that you feel like to be answered before going under such business. Because i am planning to have many clients with affordable prices to promote my another business so i dont want to be shameful to my clients...

Thanks for all your replies...

"Which files do we need to backup and how occational and with which tools?"

How you backup normally depends upon what Control Panel you are using. A large number of webhosts use c-Panel, which has a built-in backup feature that can be used by yourself to backup the server, or even by each of your individual clients to backup there own websites.

We use RAID, quite satisfied with that. It provides data integrity, you just have to choose suitable configuration. Ask the company you bought your srver from about RAID, usualyy they offer it and will readily help you with that.

RAID is not a replacment for backup. You should run off server (and preferably offsite backups) as well just to be extra safe

Agree, but with off-server back ups there's always a human factor to be taken into account and you just need another server. For one-server decision RAID is absolutely ok.

www.bqinternet.com - No more need for dedicated backup servers :)

I would suggest looking at either CentOS 4.4 or FreeBSD 6.1 for a production OS dedicated server.

my server has plesk 8.0 but wont it consume bandwidth taking backup with those tools frequently... how many times do you back up your servers. Is there something that takes back up only the additions and changes to the last backup and log the deleted files which will be effiecient for disk space something like in bginternet.com

It depends on your setup, you can connect a backup server to the 2nd nic on your server and run the backups on an internal network which will not use bandwidth. Or you can backup to a second disk drive on your server.

bqinternet allows backups using rsync which only transfers new/updated files.

If you are worried about to much data transfer, use Rsync. Rsync sends all your designated files to the backup account, then if a file is changed it only sends that particular file.

I would also separate your backups into a weekly folder and daily folder. I recommend this because one of your clients may change something on their account and find a problem a few days later. With a weekly backup you have a 7 day old file which you can provide the customer, the daily file would have already been overwritten.

RAID is a great thing to have, but if for some reason your account gets cut off, the server gets fried, or a natural disaster occurs (just examples :) ) you will not have access to those backups. Go offsite, it is worth the investment.

you should backup all the data at least once a week.
daily only backup the data which changes frequently

You can also go for a second hard drive and make it a backup disk for all your client files. cPanel has this backup feature. I am just not sure with Plesk.

Or you can state in the TOS that its the customers responsibility to keep backups of their own sites and just do backups once a month.

Agree, but with off-server back ups there's always a human factor to be taken into account and you just need another server. For one-server decision RAID is absolutely ok.

So if your mirroring 2 hard drives and hard disk 0 decides to write a load of crap to itself and then corrupt the mirror your ok? Or similarly somebody hacks your server to bits? Raid won't save you in that position, along with having another hard disk in the server.

With companies like BQ Backup you really have no excuse to send your data offsite as well as using technologies such as RAID. Many providers will also supply some NAS / FTP space for you to back up on.

I backup to three different data centres in two different cities for our systems at work. You cannot just rely on one provider and or one data centre.

Critical backups are important, but standard backups will be used far more often. Simply having a backup drive can make your life a lot easier. Do a primary backup to it, then use cron for incremental backup updates every 5 minutes. Someone does that old "oops I hit that button and deleted my whole site!" thing, and you can restore it in a mere couple of minutes from that backup drive.

For critical backups, at the very least you should be doing daily dumps to fresh tapes every day.

Maybe if you are worried so much, you can hire a 3rd party backup service provider. I think their service are quite reliable. They offer daily backups, weekly backups and some up to the minute backups.

They will also store your backups off site if I'm not mistaken.

The other point to consider is have your backup data on different drives or better still on backup servers. Putting the backup on the same server is dangerous if something goes wrong.