# Should hosts provide a backup service?



## EnveraHost (Dec 7, 2014)

Hello forum,

For anyone customers out there, do you value a backup service for your VPS solutions?

I'm considering offering weekly backups that are retained for up to a months time.

Please share your thoughts on if you believe this would be useful etc.

Best Regards,

Joshua


----------



## Mike (Dec 7, 2014)

I would at least expect some kind of disaster recovery.  If your hardware fails it isn't the customers fault.


----------



## KuJoe (Dec 7, 2014)

If you are going to offer it make sure you CYA in your Terms of Service. If your backups fail for any reason or you can't restore the exact data they need, the amount of rage you will experience will be like no other. Clients who NEED backups and don't do their own backups will use their ignorance against you in public and it will be a giant headache for you even if they are in the wrong. Just plan it out, don't cut corners, and make sure your backups are either in another geographic location or with driving distance.


----------



## comXyz (Dec 7, 2014)

I always choose providers that at least has weekly backup plan for customers.


----------



## Serveo (Dec 7, 2014)

Standard included here. Why make a hassel of it. A few PB of storage and you'r good to go. Nevertheless customers are responsible for their own data, like @KuJoe wrote you should make this clear in your TOS.


----------



## drmike (Dec 7, 2014)

I am on the fence about backups.

I can see average customer expecting it or pointing to multitude of companies that include backups in their plan.

See I can go from provider to provider and see all the usual brag points about super network and giant routers and Fort Knox style secure facility.   Every provider basically mimics the others as this is the "base" point of entry in their mind to be selling in this industry.

Backups are just a part of the "base" point of entry if you are playing competitive.

Look in relative coverage here....  ChicagoVPS - had backups, multiple time failure with those... Either didn't have them or no integrity checks going on.  RamNode, they revised their plans to not have backups as of July.   Market sentiments about that drop of expected feature, people aren't thrilled.

At end of the day, customers expect their services to work.  Imagine the electric utility grid down because they didn't have redundancy.  Imagine your water polluted because of mass filtering failure.  Data, your data is the commodity one continues to be drip fed as the service.  When that fails, customers have choices.  Since a VPS provider doesn't monopolize right of way, exclusive path to the home/business/customer that customer has MANY options, many of your competitors gladly will eat your lunch, take your customer and punt you in public about it.

All that said, backups cost money.   Must rack spare storage / server(s) to accomplish this and ideally some method of shipping copies secondary backup off site just in case something were to obliterate that datacenter / your rack.

Build the redundancy into the plans.  Build the cost into the customer invoice amount.  

If you are cheap / lean, then offer backups as a paid addon to customers.

Believe me when I say this problem isn't just one cheap VPS companies have.  Plenty of $20+ per gigabyte of RAM VPS shops that aren't telling the truth / do not have backups, even though their sale stuff lies about it.


----------



## EnveraHost (Dec 7, 2014)

I'm going to make sure offering backups is a viable option for me. If I do offer it I want to do it correctly. As @drmike said, RamNode and ChicagoVPS's backup solutions went down hill.

@KuJoe Thanks for pointing out the TOS issue, I'll make sure to cover it well.

Thanks for all your input.


----------



## KuJoe (Dec 7, 2014)

Also keep in mind that disk space is the cheap part, bandwidth is usually the costly part when you're backing up hundreds of gigabytes at a time to another location over a 1Gbps port.


----------



## fixidixi (Dec 7, 2014)

I think you should plan a backup solution carefully:

1. you do not offer backups: clean slate, state that everywhere. - noone (should) look/ask for it if its not provided: not being butthurt if something goes astray.

2. you do offer backups: then you need to be able to provide those in a very reasonable amount of time.. and well then ppl r going to depend on you: i know one backup is no backup but hey ppl live dangerously. and trust me they r going to hunt u down if you said there are backups.. and they got corrupted/failed/werent available whatever. so if you say there r backups then.. that should better really really rock solid .

as if they are not working properly you end up with a much greater loss than you would have without starting it in the first place..


----------



## Dylan (Dec 7, 2014)

I'm a fan of the "here's some free FTP backup space for you to use as you'd like" approach. Prometeus does that with their VPSes, as does Online.net with their dedicated servers.


----------



## EnveraHost (Dec 7, 2014)

For those of you that do offer backups with your VPS solution, how often do you backup the data and how long are your rotations (how long do you keep it backup)?


----------



## DomainBop (Dec 7, 2014)

Dylan said:


> I'm a fan of the "here's some free FTP backup space for you to use as you'd like" approach. Prometeus does that with their VPSes, as does Online.net with their dedicated servers.


OVH.com includes the most space: 500GB of free FTP backup (their SoYouStart only includes 100GB). Hetzner includes 100GB (on servers priced over 49 euros).  Versio.nl includes 30GB free FTP backup space per 1GB cloudbox (so 4GB cloudbox=120GB free FTP space). 



> At end of the day, customers expect their services to work.


At the end of the day I use the uptime/performance my dedicated servers as a benchmark for measuring reliability and the VPS providers whose performance fall short of that mark get dumped.  I have a very low tolerance for random reboots, lack of communications (about outages, etc), and excuses...



> I'm considering offering weekly backups that are retained for up to a months time.
> 
> Please share your thoughts on if you believe this would be useful etc.


Hosting is a commodity market full of lookalike providers.  Any value added feature you can add that sets your service apart from the offerings of the million other hosts out there is a positive. (free pocket lamps! free pocket lamps!)


----------



## KuJoe (Dec 7, 2014)

EnveraHost said:


> For those of you that do offer backups with your VPS solution, how often do you backup the data and how long are your rotations (how long do you keep it backup)?


Here's our current setup: https://securedragon.net/clients/announcements/485/Backup-frequency-changed.html

I've been wanting to find a better solution but it's on the back burner while I work on other higher priority things. We're also giving clients the ability to manage their own backups outside of the backups we perform ourselves in the next Wyvern update so they have the option to backup their VPS with a single click and restore it with another click (screenshot).


----------



## EnveraHost (Dec 8, 2014)

@KuJoe I'm really interested in the self managed backups, what are you utilizing to offer that?
I provide SolusVM as a management system and as far as I'm aware they do not offer client managed backups.


----------



## MartinD (Dec 8, 2014)

Dylan said:


> I'm a fan of the "here's some free FTP backup space for you to use as you'd like" approach. Prometeus does that with their VPSes, as does Online.net with their dedicated servers.


This. That's exactly what we do - there is then no excuse for customers not to be taking backups.


----------



## KuJoe (Dec 8, 2014)

EnveraHost said:


> @KuJoe I'm really interested in the self managed backups, what are you utilizing to offer that?
> 
> 
> I provide SolusVM as a management system and as far as I'm aware they do not offer client managed backups.


I got fed up with SolusVM a long time ago so I wrote our own control panel for our OpenVZ VPSs, it was really simple and you don't need to be good at programming to write a replacement, I think I had the first version built in less than a month while investing a few hours each weekend. For KVM we still use SolusVM but I'm planning on writing a plugin for client managed backups and getting rid of the scheduled backups (that seem to run forever) eventually.



MartinD said:


> This. That's exactly what we do - there is then no excuse for customers not to be taking backups.


I agree 100%, but there are plenty of threads on WHT that play dumb as soon as their server goes down and they realize that data they weren't backing up was worth more than their life. I can't help but laugh but at the same time, the only way to learn to take backups is loosing data for the first time (at least I hope they learn to take backups after that). I remember the first time I lost an irreplaceable file (a Fallout saved game), I was lucky it wasn't something critical that I relied on to put food on the table.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 8, 2014)

Backups are a pain in the ass.

'nuff said on that one. > 

Francisco


----------



## TurnkeyInternet (Dec 8, 2014)

The short answer is, you have to - even if you aren't upselling it, inevitably the client will take you to task (public media beating, or law suit threats, and time up your time) regardless of the waivers for self managed, you are responsible for your own data, etc.  For that reason alone its worth your investment to backup everything, and my suggestion is rotate the backup server to a 2nd backup server once every 3 months as deep storage - you would be suprised the # of clients over time who forget to pay, come back 5 months later asking if your monthly backup is still available to restart service.   Think of it almost as a 'sales' revenue cost to provide backups in that sense.


----------



## serverian (Dec 8, 2014)

Like a wise man once said, backups are a pain in the ass.


----------



## Jasson.Pass (Dec 8, 2014)

Does anyone do more then one backup like a local and then offsite?


----------



## SGC-Hosting (Dec 8, 2014)

For our shared hosting -- we provide nightly backups.  They backup to a separate array on the local machine, which then backup to a separate server within the same DC, which then backups to a remote location.  I believe this should be expected.

However, we do not provide VPS backups at this time, but we try to bring this to our customers attention before they order.  When we were testing our backup solutions, we found a few things would break in the backups (ie: ssh would stop working and VNC would be required to fix it).  Since we don't want customers upset over partially broken backups and don't want to fix broken restores, we only backup the nodes (directly to the remote backup servers) so we can get those back online quickly if they fail.  Leaving our customers responsible for backups has been working well so far, but I have no way to measure lost sales due to the lack of a backup solution.


----------



## EnveraHost (Dec 8, 2014)

@Jasson.Pass I am thinking about performing local backups twice a week and offsite backups once a week for extra safety.


----------



## EnveraHost (Dec 11, 2014)

For any of you using SolusVM, as you may know their Centralized backup is dead. I was talking with them about backup solutions and they told me that they will be adding a new backup system soon which will be much more stable.


----------



## Aurimas (Dec 15, 2014)

Well, they should and they do. But it's like sex - *both *involved parties should take care of safety.   So if you care about your site - take care of backups _yourself_.


----------



## ParkInHost (Dec 19, 2014)

Yes, In case your affected by Ddos and crashed you loose data and clients for downtime. With backup you are more promising to your clients. It involves other factors aswel


----------



## KuJoe (Dec 19, 2014)

ParkInHost said:


> Yes, In case your affected by Ddos and crashed you loose data and clients for downtime. With backup you are more promising to your clients. It involves other factors aswel


What? If a network attack can cause data loss on your RAID protected hard drives then you are doing it all wrong.


----------



## pbgben (Dec 20, 2014)

Because of the data we store, and the service we provide its simply not viable for us to provide backups. If we did then our prices would increase to a point that nobody would pay for.

I feel that data security is important and you should make sure that you take many precautions to ensure a resilient setup. (RAID etc)


----------



## HostAg (Jan 7, 2015)

I think it falls in the duty of the client to make his own backups, but in the duty of the service provider to remind him that such options are available and to urge him to use one. Most don't read the rules, tos or faq so it is better to inform him directly about backup.


----------

