I was working a case last week for a new client that’s been hosting local business websites for over three years. As with all of my case studies, I did a short survey of the client’s infrastructure, processes, and security. As I progressed through the survey I started to notice that every aspect of his business and network were organized and documented almost compulsively, indicative of someone who takes pride in what their business offers. I wondered – why does this guy even need me?

The answer to my question became clear when I got to the disaster recovery portion of the survey. When I asked, “What backup measures do you have in place for internal and client data?” To my dismay, he replied:

“Backups aren’t all that important right now”

OK, rewind. You’re a hosting provider, and you’re hosting data for businesses. You’re not hosting some college kid’s basketball website, or your mom’s quilting club pictures. You’re hosting real data, for real companies that have a reasonable expectation of reliability and security. So my next question was, “What are you going to do if one of your servers explodes?” Silence.

The fact that this guy was lucky to have gone three years without any sort of server disaster is a miracle. It happens to the best of us – hard drives fail, RAID controllers fault, and servers sometimes just – die. It doesn’t matter whether you paid $500 for your server or $5000 – a failure can happen to anyone. Would you rather wait until you have a disaster to start planning for it?

While most people agree that having a reliable backup system for their data is a concept that can go unsaid, you’d be surprised how many business don’t back up data at all.  Think about how much it would cost you to purchase an additional server to back up your data to. Now think about how much it would cause you if all your data suddenly disappeared.

“Well, it’s their responsibility to back up their own websites,” said my client.

I was talking about this with Vanessa today hoping that she could change the client’s mind about the importance of data backups.  This is an excerpt from her actual email:

While most hosting providers would agree that it is indeed the responsibility of a site owner to retain backups of their own data, you may notice that they still back up their servers on a regular basis.  It’s a known fact that most website owners don’t back up their own sites.  Some assume you’re doing it, some think it’s not important, and others just don’t know how.  You may think it’s their fault if they lose everything, but when it comes down to it, when your server crashes and you lose all your customers’ data, it’s you they are going to blame. Whether you agree or not is irrelevant – they are going to find another host.

According to Vanessa, InMotion Hosting has their backup recovery plan down to a science.  They back up their customers’ data on a regular basis, and have a specific recovery plan in place that allows them to restore service and data to customers within minutes in the event of an unexpected server failure.   When explaining this to my client, she said:

Even if the data loss is at the hand of the customer, I can’t tell you how many times they’ve been relieved to find out that we have a backup.  It’s the difference between exceeding the customer’s expectations, and letting them down. You don’t want to let them down, do you?

I’d have to agree.

Us cPanel system admins pity those who neglect to back up their sites and then blame their hosts when something goes awry…especially when cPanel makes it so damn easy to back up your entire account in just a few clicks — And we’re going to tell you how to do it.

Of course, we’re not going to stop there. We’re going to tell you exactly how the cPanel backup system works, how to generate/restore backups, what’s in the backups, and how to automate them so you can spend more time at the bar definitely working and not drinking beer, instead of worrying about what’s going to happen if a gnome crawls into your server vent and eats your hard drive.