[scottlamb]

It's a given that you should have backups of your business data, no matter if you're using a hosted installation or a local one. With backups, if the hosted provider pulls the plug, you don't lose _everything_. You may be scrambling to set up the replacement but you have your data, and in this case you'd also have the source code, so you'll survive.

And keep in mind that "Raspberry Pi fails" is a more common scenario than "provider goes out of business", so from the perspective of minimizing the scramble, that's the one I'd be more concerned about.

A bit more about backups: for something truly important, you should have an offline copy, in case a malicious party compromises credentials that can be used to overwrite both the primary and the backup. I don't think you should depend on the vendor backing up your data. Some things you just have to do yourself, unfortunately.

[bigiain]

Another commenter mentions the setup involves a Pi with an SSD and two USB sticks. It might be configured so you're required to switch usb sticks for consecutive backups, so you'd always have at least your second most recent backup completely offline - or even have the system ensure there's only a backup usb stick instead while the backup is running (and either unmount it of nag you to take it out when the backup is done).

[nemiah]

I'll actually be sending out emails if there are more than 14 consecutive backups on the usb stick to remind the customer to switch them ;)