Okay I had NO idea where to properly post this question so please don’t ban me if I posted this question in the wrong place!
I’m losing sleep at night, and the thought of downtime is my constant paranoia. My website is fairly large, and it’s hosted on one dedicated server. Every day I fear the various problematic situations that could happen to my server at any time and cause my site to go down and even the loss of all my data, all of my hard work.
I don’t have the money to spend on various dedicated servers and server management/synching solutions, so what am I to do to keep my site constantly backed-up and even online?
I’ve been looking online and obviously with back-ups I could simply buy shared web hosting plan(s) and have the server back-up to that, but that’s not the main issue here. How could I keep everything backed-up in real-time & online? Like, say the server went down, how could I set up like a mirror I guess? Would a VPS be the ideal solution or what? What would be the cheapest?
Blah, my tremendous amount of paranoia about this subject has even caused me to stop this post/thread short; I can’t even think of how to ask this question better or further. What am I to do?
if you built your own html/php/css/javascript etc etc files then you should be able to just keep a copy of them on your own local pc along with the sql scripts to create the original database if there is one.
then all you really need to worry about is to take regular backups of your database on the server if the data is dynaimc and keep them off the server.
Well I just bought a NetFirms shared hosting package - the PLUS plan - for $29 for an entire year using the coupon code “PLUS250” in which I will be using primarily for back ups from my dedicated server via a chron job.
Every year I seem to be lucky enough to snag such a deal with NetFirms to pay $10-$30 for an entire year of web hosting and when it comes to a reliable host that has been in the business for a long time - especially when you’re just using it for back-ups and possible mirroring during a catostrophe - I would highly recommend going with NetFirms.
With 10GB of disk space and 500GB of bandwidth for a web hosting plan that just cost me $29/year, I think this will be perfect. My main website’s MySQL database is just over 1GB in space so there’s definitely room to grow and my websites use approximately 200-250GB of bandwidth per month so the hosting plan should be adequate in the event of an emergency should I need to restore a back-up from my dedicated server onto a shared hosting account. (Do mind you that my dedicated server is NOT with NetFirms.)
I think I am also going to get a spare dedicated server from a totally separate company as well in which is only $40 per month for an unmanaged dual-core Intel Atom server with a 7200rpm 250GB HDD and 1GB of DDR2-800MHz RAM (no control panel obviously) which is a pretty bangin’ deal as well.
I use ftpoffsite.com for all of my sites,piece of mind is the name of the game here and they even have a backup facility in place in a differant location.I look at it as a insurance policy for my online business i hope i never have to use it but when i do i will still be in business earning revenue.
Most shared hosting restrict the use of their accounts to being used for web hosting. They do not allow you to store backups there.
The place to store backups of your site is on your own computer. If you need additional backups then burn copies of the backup on your computer to DVD and store them at a friend’s house.
Just tar daily your site and rsync it out of the server. There is no need of fancy things if you do not have money: a secondary HD, an online storage (even gmail offers 4GB and there are tools to use it as an ftp)
However if you want to sleep well, get managed services AND own backups!
I would suggest using external monitoring on a 1 minute interval (such as Pingdom.com) to watch for your site being online so that it can let you know when it’s down and you can fix it (and sleep easily). They can even SMS you if your site is offline and if you have SMS on your phone perhaps that can wake you up if needed.
Ultimately if your site is important enough that you want to be woken up in the middle of the night for an outage, I would think that you should be able to afford a quality service where you don’t have to worry so much and/or quality management.
Beyond that, just get some backup space somewhere and rsync or FTP it over… bqinternet.com is a good backup provider (ignore their poor site design, their service is solid).
There are a lot of ways to monitor your web site and I believe that the choice should be based on the importance of the web site and budget of course. And On the frequency which which you need to have that backed up.
That is my opinion though.
I went through all this meditation on backup as well and blogged 2 versions of scripts that I used to keep my data safe. The last version is really slick and I like it very much. It uses rsync to mirror the files and MySQL replication to replicate the databases to my slave MySQL server on my home machine on ADSL connection. It’s light on bandwidth and CPU on the main server which is why I developed it. Not very easy to setup so this would be for someone looking for a solid long term solution. Here are both variants with the script source code included:
