What to Look For in a Hosting Environment, Part 2: Backup Before You Go Too Far….

Alan Choyna, Monday, June 8, 2009 @ 4:52 pm

This is part 2 of a multi part series on "What to Look for in a Hosting Environment." The first installment was on monitoring and the post can be found here.

As we all know backups should be an integral part of any companies IT disaster and recovery planning, and just because your applications are running at a 3rd party hosting facility does not mean that it's "not your problem." If it’s important to your business, its important to ensure that it fits your companies backup/recovery/archival strategy.

Most hosting companies provide backup services, and many of these can be tailored to your needs. Here’s how to ensure the hosting company can meet your backup needs, and the questions to ask to ensure that your needs can be met before the contract is signed.

When a hosting company says that they will provide backup services, ask them the following:

1. What does the standard backup provide? OS configuration as well as data (for full server recovery), or data only?
2. Are backups stored on site, or are they also stored off site (for full disaster recovery)?
3. Is there a dedicated backup network (so the backups cannot impact server/service network performance)?
4. How are your backups performed? Just file level backups, or are there application backups such as MySQL dumps or MSSQL backups?
5. How often are backups performed?
6. Can there be different snapshot frequencies for certain data types (e.g. database every 30 minutes?)
7. How many GB are included in the standard backup package? What is the cost of overage?

If you're using dedicated servers then regular backups using enterprise software such as Commvault or Veritas should be fine. A full server backup should be performed weekly, together with daily incremental backups (certain critical directories may need to be backed up on an hourly basis, or whatever schedule you're comfortable with). VMWare (or other virtualization) Virtual Servers have the additional benefit of backup via the integrated backup utility on the Virtual Host Server.

If you have large storage requirements then local backups by the hosting company could be expensive. One option for consideration (depending upon the security needs of the files to be backed up) is to use a cloud storage service (such as Amazon's S3) for these files, At only 15 cents per GB (plus data transfer fees) it's a very cost effective option for important information. We were able to realize large savings in this area for one of our clients by storing large image files (totaling around 15 TB per year) on Amazon's S3 service as the hosting company was charging over 50 cents per GB for a saving of over $5000 per month on backups alone.

As always we recommend redundant hardware (servers/storage devices) for all applications to minimize downtime in case of hardware failure, as no matter how good the backup strategy is, recovery of a large system will take time. And time is money. Your money.

Related posts:

1. What to Look for in a Hosting Environment: Part 1 – Monitoring
2. Little Lost MySQL Lambs
3. Process, Environment, and Incentives
4. You’re at the Software Development Finish Line! …. or are you?
5. hardware driver support confusion

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1. 

   I always enjoy learning how other people employ Amazon S3 online storage. Check out my very own tool CloudBerry Explorer that helps to manage S3 on Windows . It is a freeware. http://cloudberrylab.com/

   Comment by Andy, Tuesday, June 9, 2009 @ 1:55 am

2. 

   Good article! What are your thoughts regarding backup procedures for companies hosting on shared servers?

   Comment by WebHostingHelpGuy, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 @ 6:18 pm

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