Back Yo Stuff Up

Learned an important lesson about web server backups... don't trust your hosting service to do them for you. And don't think a monthly manual backup will suffice as a secondary option.

Besides the fact we've seen plenty of stories where hosts weasel out of responsibility if they lose them, there's another reason to ensure you have daily automated backups stored on one or more third party services... recovering from your host going down.

We just had a nearly 5-day outage for Seattle CoderDojo's site because the host suffered a massive hardware failure. Instead of making access to backups available, they made a huge number of customers wait until they could relaunch their virtual server instances and restore the sites from backups themselves. This left many customers waiting days while their and their clients sites were down, losing sales, losing Google pagerank, losing emails...

I waited because our backup was admittedly out of date and I did not have the time to rebuild all the new content and other elements of the site.

Had I been able to pull in a nightly back-up, our downtime would have been a few hours at most. And while A Small Orange had nightly backups, I couldn't access them. I was at their mercy.

This is different than your host losing your backup data. This is where your host has it, but they won't give it to you. Perhaps they're hoping when they restore your service, you'll breathe a sigh of relief and won't find it necessary to go find another host (as happened when they had a similar but less severe outage earlier this month).

Nope, the moment I saw my server was back up, I migrated my sites to a new server at another host I'd already engaged to at least bring mail back up for my most important sites, then updated the DNS files to point the last of my domains there (for the less important sites).

The crisis is over, but the next step is to find a process for backing up all my sites so I never have to suffer a multi-day outage again. Oh, and fighting with A Small Orange (a subsidiary of Endurance International Group - the big shadowy conglomerate behind many web hosts like HostGator, BlueHost, and more) to get a refund of money I spent on upgrades and service extensions in November.