[dannyw]

Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it.

I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.

[EricE]

>and may take your servers and data with it.

Only if you let them.

Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider?

No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night?

There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts...

It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse.

My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience.

Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!

[renewiltord]

Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything.

And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.

[qeternity]

> GKE + RDS

Uh what? Really?

This doubles your failure surface.

[renewiltord]

True, but I only need two nines. It's my personal stuff.

[klodolph]

This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client).

For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.