I have been absorbing as much info from this great board as possible for a couple weeks before migrating my reseller accounts to a 4webspace RAQ. The amount of information here has really helped me decide on the host and server for the needs I currently have. Thanks for this great resource.

On to the questions:

1) I am thinking of getting two RAQ3's and backing up daily to the second. I will still be doing weeklies to my local system but the speed of upload from my cable modem would make restoring from a local backup really slow. Are there better options for fast secure daily/weekly backups from a 4webspace RAQ?

2) Has anyone been daring enough to install the BETA Urchin 3 on thier RAQ? (http://www.urchin.com/products/urchinforcobalt.html)

3) Can FastCGI or mod_perl run on a RAQ3?

4) What other software is considered manditory to install for a new dedicated RAQ3 user with basic Linux experience? I'm not doing any heavy programming, a couple ecommerce sites and a few mySQL's. There will be no telnet or FTP access by clients, I am managing the sites.


Thanks again for all the help!
Bubba

1. Take a look at: http://rsync.samba.org, its a great way
to sync up two *nix boxes.

2. Can't help you there, sorry

3. Check to make sure, but my understanding is that mod_perl is installed by default. If not then yes you can, becasue we run it. I am not sure about FastCGI, but I see no reason why it wouldn't.

4. I don't think PHP is installed by default on a RaQ3, so you probably want to install that. other than that you should be ready to go :).

allan

I just in the process of moving to 4webspace. I have about 20 virtually hosted sites now and one dedicated coming up.

I am unsure how to handle backups. It is sooooo slow backing up the files to the office computers, and I was thinking of getting additional RaQ3's and backing up the data from one RaQ to another in the same NOC.

But, what is the general consensus on how long to keep the backed up data??? If I backup my sites daily, do I need to have several back-up RaQs, each to hold a day or two worth of backups? Or do you write over yesterdays stuff today?

I'd like to know what procedures other hosts are doing?

How often do you back up?
Does it run automatically?
What software do you use?
Do you back up within the same NOC or to a diffent location?
Do you use another company to handle your backups?
Do you include the cost of backups with your hosting or do you sell it as an upgrade?
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Thanks for any suggestions, advice and comments!
Maxine

You might want to look into tape backup, either from your provider, or possibly shipping them a drive (not sure if you can do this, but worth a shot).

I seem to remember Steve (of 4webspace) mentioning something about them working on a backup solution for all of the the RaQs at the NOC. I'll have to shoot him an email and get back to you on the status of that.

Maxine,

How long you keep them is up to you, but make sure you
publish that information, and include it in your contracts.

You also need to decide the purpose of backing up. Are you doing it so that if someone accidentally overwrites their index.html file and does not have a local copy you can restore it for them (and will you charge for this service), or are your backups only designed for catastrophic failure?

We do the following:

An incremental backup is done daily.
A full backup is done weekly.

The backups are ftp'd to an account we have with ibackup.com. We store the incremental backups for 2 weeks, and then they are deleted. Full backups are stored for a month.

We use the Cobalt RaQ interface for the incremental backup, but use a different program for the weekly backups. If you have a second RaQ you should have no problem fitting that muck backup data on the second RaQ, since it is all compressed. The only flaw in this is if something were to happen to the 4webspace datacenter you would lose everything.

Of course, if you do backup to remote site, you are then applying 2-3 gigs a night of data transfer against your account (unless, like us, you aren't charged for transfer).

we also do not backup dedicated servers, we will offer clients an ibackup.com account (and help them with script install :))...but we want dedicated customers to manage their own backups.

Hope this helps.