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by Morgawr
4274 days ago
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>You know how often earthquakes happen? fires? Yes, let's save money from buying fire extinguishers, that doesn't happen very often anyway. I mean, for big companies with money it's okay to have safety procedures but for small companies we can expect them to ignore it, right? After all "nobody does that anyway" :) Sarcasm aside, such accidents can wipe out your entire business and destroy your credibility, just because something doesn't happen often it doesn't mean you should ignore it. Plus, depending on the area you live in, earthquakes can be very common, but I digress. All of this aside, I agree with the rest of what you said, but it doesn't invalidate the fact that if you want to have proper data safety practices you need offsite backups (I'm talking as a service provider, not as a user. Of course you want to backup your data yourself too, as a user) |
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And yes, all of us know that if we lose the data? we lose the customer, and worse, we lose the customer and they say (justifiable) bad things about us. If you lose all your data? yeah, you are out of business.
Even so, there's a huge difference between how a low-end hosting company is run and how an "enterprise" datacenter is run, and expecting enterprise reliability at low-end pricing is... not realistic.
If you think that your low-end VPS provider is doing everything possible to back up your data... you are likely to be disappointed. Hell, I don't have regular backups, or offer for-pay backups at all myself. I'm working on it for the next version of my management software, but for now, I'm very up-front with my customers that they need to back up their own stuff, and my architecture is such that most of the time, data loss is confined to one server, and yeah, if someone got in and wiped it all out, I would very clearly be bankrupt. but... I'm only saying this because yeah, in this market, you don't get "enterprise level" backups. If you want 'enterprise backups' you have to do it yourself, or pay 'enterprise money'
You can say that it's like not having a fire extenguisher, and I'm not going to argue with you, but I've worked in this sector for well over a decade, and yeah, that's just how things are done. A low-end hosting setup is going to be way different (and way cheaper) than an "enterprise" hosting setup.
and I do know that many of my competitors have gone out of business because both backup and production could be written to by the same user (do you remember HyperVM? it was a disaster for many in the industry.)
I don't know of any competitors that have gone out of business because of physical destruction of their datacenter.
just saying... off site backups are good... but I would get the security and 'defense in depth' setup squared away first, and nobody does, because it's not on the checklists.
more on the hypervm thing:
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/security/25559-hyperv...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/lxlabs_funder_death/
The idea was that lots of people used this cpanel-style VM hosting software. It worked pretty okay, from what I hear. I never used it myself. Anyhow, there was a vulnerability, and some asshole decided to use that vulnerability to hack into a bunch of different providers, wipe the production data, and then to wipe the backups, too.
it happens.