You’re using the terms backup and snapshot interchangeably but they are not the same thing. Snapshots are images and require your droplet to be powered down. Which service are you providing?
Snapshots are used because they persist even after the droplet/volume was deleted and you pay per GB/month instead of 20% of the droplet price.
For volumes, you only have the option to create a snapshot.
The "backups" term is used mostly for SEO purposes. When a user wants backups for his droplet, probably for him is not important if the backup is considered by DO a "backup" or a "snapshot".
The DigitalOcean backups are also images at the core because the point-in-time image is created in the same way.
From the DO docs:
1. A snapshot of the live system is taken, creating a crash-consistent, point-in-time image.
2. The snapshot is backed up off-disk.
3. The snapshot is deleted once the backup is complete.
Regarding the recommendation of powering of the droplet, in the future maybe there will be an option to choose if you want this before taking the snapshot. This will be useful for droplets with write-intensive operations.
Does a snapshot mean that you're doing native DO snapshots? The throughput for these is terrible (1-4gb/min) and also had performance implications in our past tests.
Yes, native DO snapshots are used. I tested with droplets up to 100 GB in occupied disk size and the snapshot required over 1 hour to be ready. For volumes, the time is lower.
Unfortunately, this is a limitation for most of the cloud providers.
As long as you're happy trusting someone who ripped off another persons business, and was then stupid enough to rip off their site content and forget to change the name.
And then when they were caught, stole another companies privacy policy and again forgot to change the name.
This copycat will last a month or two and then vanish. You'd have to think very little of your own website/business/server to trust someone like that.
I don't really know snapshooter all that well (the one they ripped off) but just googling it I can see its got a bit more credibility, it looks like they're a digitalocean partner which alone speaks volumes.
Where are the "backups" being stored? Are they just snapshots sitting in my DO account? If so, I can just do this by myself with the DO API... if not, how are you downloading the snapshots? I don't recall if DO allows this right now.
This seems like unfair criticism. I'd say snapshooter and snapshotly are sufficiently different. If the websites were similar, I'd see your point, but snapshotly is different enough that's it a clear price competitor.