Backups have traditionally constituted one of the most wasteful tasks in history of computing. Every day thousands of System Administrators worldwide spend valuable time performing and restoring backups.
While developing Leanservers we experienced the same exact issue. So we thought of creating one of our less known and coolest features: backups.
Behind that naive name a killer feature is hiding:
- frequent: our backups run daily;
- automatic: no action needs to be taken by the end user other than signing up;
- full: each of our backups is full and independent from each other which minimizes the risk of data loss. It’s not fun when you have an incremental backup split in 10 pieces and one of the pieces gets corrupted: automatically all the other parts become useless. And that is your precious data.
- offsite: we use backup servers that are located remotely (i.e. thousands of kilometers from the servers that hold user account data) on different datacenters run by different companies and all these machines do is… backups. Yes, they are dedicated.
- don’t hinder performance: thanks to having this remote machines, all the heavy IO happens somewhere else. Our user account data is periodically synchronized securely over the Internet with our backup servers. Folder and databases.
- accessible anytime through a browser: we keep the latest 30 full backups accesible through our control panel. You just need a browser. This can be used as a version control system giving the possibility of reverting back to any point in time within the last month of work. Even on databases.
If you are thinking that this is the same as having a plugin installed on your CMS of choice (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc…) that runs periodically and creates a full backup and keeps it somewhere and/or sends it to you through email… sorry, it is not. The action of performing backups requires a significant amount of server effort. Which translates into slower websites. Additionally, keeping backups on the same device where your data resides is looking for trouble. Hard disks fail. We hate it, but they do.
At the moment this article is being written, Leanservers has infrastructure in Canada, USA, Germany and Malaysia. Sites hosted with us are currently being served from Canada or Malaysia and backups are being stored offsite on USA and Germany. That is pretty remote. And we are expanding continuously.
The data of a user that has chosen to go for backups is stored four times: server where his account is hosted, replicated fresh copy on USA, archived backup on USA, duplicate of archived backup on Germany. Without going into too much (boring) detail, that’s a lot of redundancy! Possibilities of having his data lost are virtually zero.
Those multiple levels of redundancy on different and remote locations are the main reason that makes us charge for backups: the infrastructure needs to be supported. Following our philosophy we prefer to allow our customers to chose what exactly they want to use and only pay for that. No grey areas.
We also experienced issues with other hosting companies in the past that are supposed to have backups but you never know until the day you really need them… and you (sadly) discover that they are not in place. And that makes you loose all your data.