Web Hosting Talk : Advertising Forums : Community Reviews : Other Reviews : backup specifications and price points

[sailor]

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.

[cywkevin]

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.

[TAK]

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.

[volfman]

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.

[TAK]

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?

[sailor]

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

[hiryuu]

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

[TAK]

Take a glance at this for how much space you will need probably in a 2nd HD: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...hreadid=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.

[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?


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)

[Dan L]

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!

[Joshua]

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

[rusko]

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

[Mark_TVI]

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...

[sailor]

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

[sailor]

bump - thoughts?