Cloud Hosting and Backups...Make no assumptions.
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I'm still recovering from a hardware failure at our cloud host's datacenter one week ago that took the disk drive with it. There was a backup of our website folder tree but not...wait for it...of the drive. Naturally, when I was told there was a backup that was being restored to the drive I assumed the drive was being restored from the backup. I became suspicious that something was amiss when the sysadmin asked me twice how the web server settings would get restored, and looked puzzled when I replied they were on the drive, hence on the backup, and therefore when the restore was complete we need only restart the web server and voila! Well, the truth came out when the restore (such as it was) completed and I checked for key services used by the web application and found they were missing. The takeaway: make no assumptions about backups whether hosting is in-house or managed. Ask specific questions and get specific answers.
Had this discussion with my buddy whos in IT about how all these hosting sites cloud or otherwise actually do backups. I can believe all these sites use tape back-ups. Read thru the agreement of my hosting site from what I gathered is they do their best. Any ideas how stuff is actually backup by someone in the industry.
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Do they have "Tele" somewhere in their name? Just asking as last week one of the hosts of our "cloud" provider went down and we lost all VMs on that host; and previously they've taken our stuff offline to do scheduled maintenance. We're now looking elsewhere.
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No "Tele" in the provider's name. Will have a new provider in a month or two. This will be "managed" hosting. I don't deal with the contracts but I've made those who do aware of the need to know exactly what "managed" means.
Thanks & good luck!