How Our Backups Work
Recently we've been getting some questions in our help desk about how our nightly backups work.
While I have a good bit of material on our blog about how to actually use the backups, I feel like I need to explain the backup process in more detail.
What Type Of Backups Come With Your Account?
All of our Web Hosting and Reseller Hosting accounts come with complimentary nightly backups.
They run once each night and we retain one day's worth of data.
All of the data backed up is stored in a secure third-party location and is freely available inside each cPanel account (you don't have to open a ticket to access it).
In order for us to keep our prices competitive, we can only offer 1 day's data retention complimentary.
For an additional fee of $1.99 per month you can add 5GB of backup space and retain up to 30 days worth of data (read more below).
Backup Requirements
My number one goal creating PearlFibers was to be able to offer an affordable, high-speed, reliable, and secure cloud hosting infrastructure.
In order for us to accomplish this we have to draw the line in the sand somewhere and set limits on what we can and what we cannot backup.
After much internal discussion, we've set the following requirements for our complimentary backups to run:
- Accounts cannot have more than 100,000 Inodes (What Is An Inode?)
- Accounts cannot have more than 20GB disk usage
If your cPanel account falls into one of the above categories, it will not be included in our complimentary backup service.
Why We Have Backup Requirements
When the server conducts backups each night it runs a process called rsync where it copies over your file structure over to our backup servers.
Each day, it examines the files you've modified and only updates those, to keep the host server maintaining the highest level of performance.
For accounts that are very large, this can take a toll on the input/output (IO) of the solid state drives, causing stress on them that can create a degrade in performance.
We've found by using the above limits, we're able to always maintain the performance we're known for as well as the ability to offer these type of backups.
Please understand, we're not trying to be jerks, but the performance of our cloud is very important to us as we don't want to offer a solution that is slow or one that is plagued with downtime.
How To Get More Than 1 Day's Retention
If you want to have more than 1-days backup retention (and I highly recommend it) we've partnered with a company called DropMySite to streamline the process.
When you sign-up for your account, you can select how much backup space you'd like:
If you're signing-up for a Reseller account, please remember this only covers your primary domain name.
This is especially important for many Resellers as this is where they keep their WHMCS installation and when you're dealing with customer data, you can never have to many backups.
If you've already signed up for an account with us at PearlFibers, you can easily add these to your account inside our client portal:
If you are a Reseller and wish to add a separate DropMySite account for your customers, you have to reach out to our sales team for a custom order.
Additionally, you can manually add other websites to your DropMySite account if you have space available.
VPS Backups
If you have one of our VPS hosting packages, you have full control over how you handle your backups.
You're free to integrate with any service you'd like and I have a nice article here on our blog on How To Setup A 3 Point, Fail Proof Backup System For Your VPS.
Please remember, Virtual Private Servers have different features than our Shared Hosting so understand there is no "automated" backups when you order, you must configure.
Make Sure You Have Backups
Regardless of the route you choose, backups are VERY important. If you're using WordPress at least consider a free service such as ManageWP to have at least some type of backup.
It's always very dis-heartening to see a customer get in trouble because they don't have adequate backups. We try to do all we can with everything mentioned above, but there is never an excuse not to have your own backups as well. You can never have to many!
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, I'd be happy to answer them!