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by coalescence 3715 days ago
Low end hosting doesn't generally have backups, because it's well, cheap. Extra overheads make the price increase, then you're not cheap and can't compete at that end.

Usually there are backup options included in the plan for upsell possibilities with these kinds of providers. Really, you should not expect a service that has 'cheap' in the name to offer any kind of backup.
2 comments
drostie 3715 days ago
Furthermore, is Namecheap authorized to copy their clients' data by their terms of service? If not, automatic backups may bypass totally-reasonable expectations that other users have. Backups can potentially be a threat vector, for example. There might be many reasons why one of Namecheap's clients might say "you copied this data?! and now I have no control of the environment the backup lives in?!"...

An example would be if some service stored credit card information temporarily while waiting for transactions etc. to process but then purged each record after two weeks later. A compromise of the backups containing, say, weekly snapshots could then contain 90% of a client's ever-stored financial information whereas a compromise of the main site might only reveal a couple percent of them.

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coalescence 3715 days ago
That's true, although we should be fairly concerned about a company using very cheap hosting on VPS with no form of encryption storing anything sensitive. You may also be breaching PCI DSS (fwiw) doing that.

In reality though, more companies do this than should be allowed. I worked for an ISP in a previous life and even on the super cheap shared hosting there were companies that were making a decent turnover and then using the cheapest possible hosting for their email/site. The quantity of these companies was a significant number too.

Especially when they were kicking off on the phone due to inevitable maintenance/downtime. Trying to appease customers that turn over 10 million a year and pay £5 a month for hosting is a bit wtf. You pay for what you get... that's no different in hosting.

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ChrisDutrow 3715 days ago
> Really, you should not expect a service that has 'cheap' in the name to offer any kind of backup.

They never spell this out for you though, usually they imply that their service is just as good as their pricier rivals. As a result, many people get burnt before they get savvy. Some never get savvy, they just get turned off to the industry.

Not sure what the alternative is. I suspect a company that did clearly spell out their pros and cons would risk having stunted growth or go out of business entirely.

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coalescence 3715 days ago
There are a couple of adages that may be valid.

"If it's too good to be true, it probably is"

and

"Cheap, Good, Fast - pick two"

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