[ashray]

Files are pretty straightforward, especially in a possibly low volume - startup that cannot afford a dedicated sysadmin stage, not going to address that here.

Simple database backup would be to replicate to a slave (just addressing mysql here for a simple case). Stop replication, backup, restart replication. Easy as that. More complicated scenarios need more complicated setups but hey, we're not talking about saving the last 0.0000001 seconds of data here, this is about losing all your data, from day 1.

Obviously I cannot comment on the specific backup needs for these guys since I don't know their app. However, I can still ensure that an app that is running on a shared hosting environment (meaning - it's not that complex..) has a reasonably good (24 hour snapshot ?) backup potential within a few minutes.

I think it'd have been a decent compromise if they even had a backup from yesterday with a few minutes/hours of effort upfront.

Not saying here that a sysadmin role isn't justified, just that there are a few steps you can follow so that while you don't have a sysadmin, nothing gruesome happens to you.