I thought I would take some time and talk about one of the least thought about parts of the hosting package for most clients, the backups. It’s something that until you need it, you’re not very likely to even think about it, and you’re probably not going to think about it when looking for hosting.
To help keep the chances for data loss to a minimum we employ a three part process for our backups.
Step 1:
Since we run cPanel as our control panel, it only makes sense to use the built-in backup system that cPanel provides. The only drawback is it can create a heavy load on the system, especially with larger accounts. If you’re using a host that only uses cPanel backups and your account uses more than 30-50,000 inodes, chances are they aren’t taking backups of your account due to this heavy load. We take a full cPanel backup of every account each week and keep those backups on hard drives on the server.
Step 2:
Every week we also transfer full backups off of each server to a completely separate datacenter. This is done in case something happens to the datacenter, we can still access account data. This is a critical aspect of our business continuation plan, and is something we strongly believe in.
Step 3:
This is the crown jewel of our backup process. Taking advantage of the industry-leading backup technology provided by R1Soft we take full backups of every file on each server 4 times each day. This includes not only all account files, but also server configuration files, operating system files, etc. Their technology allows backups to be taken without causing noticeable load on the servers, helping keep sites running as fast as they should. It also allows users to restore backups of their own files, choosing from several different restore points going back months. R1Soft provides the best system for backups, and we’re proud to be able to offer it free as a part of all of our shared and reseller plans and as an addon for all servers as well.
Step 4:
This is a bonus step, and not really a true backup method, but all of our shared/reseller servers run hot-swappable, hardware RAID-10 drives. This gives not only the best data-protection available, but also offers the best read/write speed and is another component that helps keep servers fast.
Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how we’re working every day to keep your data as safe as we can.
Managed didecated servers comes with unlimited admin time – BuyHTTP