A number of clients have asked us to clarify our backup provision following some recently well publicised issues with competitors.

Reported Issue One: Deleted Data
An Unnamed Web Hosting Provider deleted all their clients data with the misuse of the rm -rf command.  This was widely reported in the media last week and turns out this was a stunt to see if a post could go viral.  It’s never good to joke about loss of data in our view and this was a badly thought out stunt.  It prompted about 8 clients to ask us about our backups as it was reported in the mainstream media late last week.

Reported Issue Two:  123-Reg Massive VPS Issue
A competitor selling VPS servers is undergoing a 2+ day major outage where it appears a lot of their VPS servers have simply stopped working.  If you use Twitter you may wish to follow along by searching for ‘123reg’ in TweetDeck or your Twitter app.  Although competitors we see all these other companies at trade fairs and we genuinely feel bad at this happening as we know some of the guys from that company.  We wish them all the best as they try to recover from this. Read BBC Article here, or read the Daily Mail article here.

Our helpdesk is pretty busy today with clients asking us questions about backups as they have been hearing about the 123-Reg outage.  We thought we would write a quick blog post to inform our managed VPS clients what we do for them and we hope this answers your questions.  We’re here to help if you need to know anything else.

BWF Backups and Data Protection Explained
Like all hosting companies we do not guarantee any data but we believe what we do will significantly reduce the risk of data loss due to any issues like those recently reported by other companies in the media.  We strongly recommend that all clients keep their own backups as well of any data they consider to be of high importance and our team can advise on the best way to do that on a case by case basis.

Hardware RAID Arrays
All our production and backup servers have RAID with 99.5% of all servers having Hardware RAID.  In simple terms Hardware RAID means there are more drives than are needed and data is replicated across the drives.  This helps protect data in the event of hardware failure such as an SSD drive failing.  All our hardware chassis have hot swap drives so in most cases when a drive fails we swap it out and the array rebuilds.

R1Soft Off Server Backups
All our managed VPS servers come with R1Soft Enterprise Backup as standard included in the cost.  Self Managed Servers are not backed up and backups can be added for a very cost effective price at time of ordering but many clients choose not to add this.  Our backups take place to a completely separate server cluster with its own Hardware RAID array.  The logic is by the law of averages it’s very unlikely that your production server and backup server would fail at the same time.  We also provide you with individual logins on request so you can check your backups and download for local secure storage if needed.  We also have clients who for due diligence purposes provide their own backup server that they control and we can of course set up backups to these servers too on request.

Our servers and backups are NOT linked in any way. Should someone accidentally delete your server the backups are not automatically deleted. We also manually terminate all Virtual machines when clients cancel and we do not use any automated scripts ensuring a human eye checks all termination actions

Best Effort Management
Our Managed VPS Servers come with Best Effort Management meaning should disaster strike our team will work with you and for you to help you recover in the fastest time possible.  We will not leave you on your own at a time of crisis and we have contingency plans to bring in all staff should an emergency occur.

2 Hour Hardware Replacement SLA
Our hardware is located in the IOMART ISO 27001 certified facility in Maidenhead in Berkshire which ensures the best physical security of your data.  We also have a 2 hour Service Level Agreement with our vendors for replacement of hardware that fails for fastest recovery time.

Spare Parts Always in Stock
We keep spare parts always in stock for every server we deploy.  This is why our range of servers we provide on our dedicated page is limited to Intel E3 and E5 processors.  Every server we deploy we ensure sufficient spare parts are there for immediate use in the event of failure.

Local Backups
Periodically downloading and securely storing your data (web files AND databases) is an important way to assist you in recovering should disaster strike.  Our team will gladly advise you on the best way to take local backups of your data.  Just reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to advise.

Spare Hardware Always Online
As a company we have hot spare servers always powered up and ready to help restore clients in the event of a total disaster.  Should something happen your server our team can quickly help restore your data from the backups to ensure fastest recovery.

What if you have servers elsewhere?
Perhaps you have a server with a competitor and need to ensure data protection in the event of a failure.  We provide managed server backups for third party servers.  We have lots of clients who trust us for backups and prices start from £7 per month.

Please pop in a helpdesk ticket if you need any more advice or help and a member of our team will gladly assist you.  To clarify we have NO outages we are only writing this blog post in response to well publicised outages from competitors that have prompted a large number of clients asking similar questions.

We hope this blog post helps address these questions.