amuck-landowner

Should hosts provide a backup service?

EnveraHost

New Member
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
 

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
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.
 
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Serveo

Member
Verified Provider
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

100% Tier-1 Gogent
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

New Member
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

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
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

Active Member
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..
 

EnveraHost

New Member
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

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
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

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
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

New Member
@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

Retired Staff
Verified Provider
Retired Staff
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

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
@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.

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.
 

TurnkeyInternet

Active Member
Verified Provider
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.
 
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