I'm used to operating dedicated servers. This year I want to venture into getting a reseller account and / or media temple account.
With my dedicated servers, I do automated mysql dumps and I do nightly rsyncs of all my /home /etc and other important data so disaster recovery is possible.
My question is, how do you do the same thing? Sleep well at night? with these regular web hosting accounts?
I see most newbie people who pay for web hosting do not bother to backup their data. Ignorance is bliss until disaster strikes.
How do you automatically backup your data (mysql and directories) in your multiple web hosting accounts like reseller or grid service media temple?
I am not familiar with quick backup methods, but let me give you an example which might help you provide me with the best possible information.
1. I currently run a hosting business.
2. cPanel accounts are backedup nightly.
Question: I am worried something may happen to the server (DoS Attack) or just an internal error - what would be the quickest way to have your entire webserver back online?
I was thinking another HD with the same installation/configuration.
What procedures have other hosting organizations taken to prevent there web server from loosing downtime.
I'm putting together a disaster recovery plan and I'm trying to come up with a quick way to get new machines in place in case of catastrophic hardware failure, e.g. two servers go down at the same time (this is an HA setup and must always remain fault tolerant). At this point I'm trying to find someone who would rent a server to me, allowing me to take physical possession of it.
Why do I need physical possession of it? The problem is that I use IP-based storage on a private network and therefore can't rely on a rented server in another cabinet, even across the aisle in the same datacenter, without adding significant complexity to my setup.
So my question, in summary, is this: What would be the fastest, cheapest and simplest way to get a new server in my cabinet in a few short hours?
My servers are going to be in Colo4Dallas, so if there's a provider there who specializes in this or has made an arrangement with you or someone you know in the past, please let me know about them. If you can think of a better way to do things (the obvious solution of investing in more servers excluded),
I'm trying to find a good hosting provider to host our company's website as our fallback option in case of disaster. One or two dedicated servers should do it, but it'll need the space/bandwidth to host a database of around 60-80 gigs, with the ability to rsync newer copies of the database on a regular basis. We also need to store a Tomcat website, which will take up much less space, but also need to be rsynced to be kept up to date on a regular basis, though less often than
Also, we probably need Red Hat Linux specifically, as opposed to other flavors of Linux.
Of course we need root access to install the other apps we'll need. My paramount concern is the security of our companies data, much of which not only has to be protected for our companies sake, but also for laws such as HIPAA, etc. Cost is a consideration, but security, dependability, and flexibility (root access to our machine, ability to rsync between sites) is more important.
I was wondering if anyone's got suggestions for me, hosting providers they've liked for these purposes? I'm looking at Media Temple's dpv Nitro option right now ...
There is so much information on disaster recovery and backing up one's server, that I'm getting glassy-eyed trying to take it in. Maybe if I became an actual case study, and get some "group think" help, this thread could benefit many others in a similar situation.
Current Situation:
1. I'm a small hosting company, 5 years in existence, with about 350 clients. www.mlhi.net
2. Dedicated Linux server, PLESK CP w/unlimited domains license, fully managed at HostNexus (great guys). It does not have a RAID array (used to have that at Rackspace) but it does have a backup drive that everything is backed up to with a cron job every night.
3) In addition I have a Linux Sys Admin on retainer, www.linuxbox.co.uk (he is better than excellent). Two years of excellent server maintenance and security on top of the managed service I get at HostNexus.
4) I just bought a VPS plan at JauguarPC.com after much research (a lot of it here at WHT) and as they say "so far so good" with the ease of dealing with them. I have not setup anything there yet- just got the VPS provisioned a few days ago.
Fears and Concerns:
1. Data center destroyed/ my server burns up (including backup drive) etc etc.
2. DDOS attack (which did hit this data center a few months ago and I was down for hours)
3. If I had to FTP everything back to another server from my local, at 18 GB, it's not too cool.
Want to do this:
1. I want my Sys Admin to run a backup copy (and incrementals every night) to an identically configured VPS server at JaguarPC. Both servers are now running identical PLESK 8.4.
2. I want the fastest recovery possible without spending a ton of money. I know this means I don't get an "instant" recovery, but recovery within 24 hours is more than OK. None of my customers are ecommerce... just brochureware sites.
My "I'm not an expert" plan:
1. If primary server goes bye-bye forever, I can login to my BulkRegister/Enom account and change the child nameserver IPs to the IP's of the VPS. In 24 hours or less, every request for the nameservers would then be routed to the new server.
2. I can create an A record on every domain like www2.johndoeinsurance.com that would point to the IP at the VPS, so I can ease my mind anytime I want to make sure everything is safe and sound on the second server, and ready to go in an emergency.
How do I configure the DNS?
I control dns at Enom for about two-thirds of my customers. I have ALL domains pointed to ns.mlhi.net and ns2.mlhi.net. Here are my options??
1. I create two more child nameservers... ns3 and ns4 and have then pointed to the IPs at the new server, then update all the domains I control. The rest of the customers I can email and ask them to add the additional nameservers. I know... good luck on them doing it.
2. I change the ns2 IP to go to the new server. And I make sure when I make edits on a website during the day that I FTP to both servers.
3. I don't have any nameservers assigned to the new server. I just change the IP on the existing nameservers in the event of an emergency.
I'm working on a plan for restoring my whole Plesk server fast in a worst case scenario. Which will never happen hopefully.
The backup is a full backup done by the Backup Manager in Plesk. It lies on a remote FTP server.
Right now I'm fetching the whole backup directory with wget while in the background the Plesk Installation is running. These actions take about 1h to complete.
Afterwards I would restore with /usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore.
Is there a better way? For example installing Plesk directly out of a full backup?
I have a dedicated server that only has around 3-4gb of data on it. I would like to do automated nightly backups for as cheap as possible. I don't want to pay to have my server managed just to be able to have automated backups, so what other solutions do I have? I know I can get really cheap storage from Amazon or Mosso, but is there a way to automate this?
some software that can be ran on a desktop that will allow me to download and backup my databases from my Cpanel server.
I have a remote backup server that once the databases are backed up can be uploaded to this location. Im not too sure if im going around things in a long winded fashion, but ideally i need a solution that can take management of my database backups.
The cpanel dedi im using at the moment is currently utilising the Backup feature, so this is a secondary backup. At the same time i would like to select which databases are backed up too.
Realistically im looking for your expert advice here, im a novice when it comes to server admin etc so your expert help to guide me would be fantastic. Im not to sure whether i would need a desktop tool to back these databases up, or whether it can be done at a server level? Dare i say it im just used to using GUI's and not so familiar with command lines etc.
My host just recently sent the hard drive with my sites to a data recovery company called Gillware. Website is [url]- but they failed and gave the following reason:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gillware
Unfortunately, your file system was so severely damaged that no data can be recovered. We will make arrangements to return your drive via UPS. Sorry we could not help you further.
Gillware Inc.
Do you guys think there's still hope?
The hard drive is now being shipped to a more well known company, Drive Savers - [url]and I'm guessing that this is the last hope, because the more the drive gets tampered with, the more chance of permanent data loss.
So yeah.. I was just wondering what you think? If the file system is so severely damaged, do you think it STILL can be recovered?
Since they had disaster with their billing system it seems their support is falling apart also. I submitted a support ticket 1 month ago and still no reply!?
In light of whats happened at the Planet in Houston we are moving up our plans to have an external DNS nameserver (with failover) and emergency website to alert customers in the event of our data center (C4D in Dallas) ever goes down.
From all the forum messages reagrds this event its apparent that a lot of hosting companies are suffering the worst from having their support websites at the DC where they host their customers and have no way of notifying their customers of whats going on.
Looking to trade 1U of rack space and 1 ip address anywhere in US (Dallas preferred) with someone else who is looking for the same thing.
While we are extremely happy with C4D and have faith in their DC, you can never be 100% prepared for things beyond your control.
Everytime I create a new website account in WHM I am required to go in and manually edit the DNS record to include the MX record of my mail server.
I would like to streamline the process and need a way to make WHM automatically include my MX records every time I create a new account. Is this possible?
The hostname (server.mydomain.com) resolves to . It should resolve to xx.xx.xxx.xx. Please be sure to correct /etc/hosts as well as the 'A' entry in zone file for the domain.
Some are all of these problems can be caused by /etc/resolv.conf being setup incorrectly. Please check this file if you believe everything else is correct.
You may be able to automaticly correct this problem by using the ' Add an A entry for your hostname ' under ' Dns Functions ' in your Web Host Manager
Is there a way to automate the generation and FTP of home directory backups in Cpanel?
CPanel lets you create a full account backup and ftp's the result to another server but can only be done manually from what i understand. Is there a way to initiate the process automatically? maybe schedule it for once a week.
Are there any providers out there can be integrated with Plesk so that DNS zones for all vhosts are automatically propagated on the secondary DNS service?
I've asked DNS Made Easy but they advised that the domain has to be set up manually with them first.
I heard from some technicians that SAS disk recovery is going to be much more difficult than the current generation of hard disk. Is it true? Anyone tried recovering from a spoilt SAS hard disk before?
I run an online music archive site . Djs can upload their mixes to share and we also archive radio shows for people to listen back to.
Basically I was wondering if it would be possible to build a secondary server that could do this for me.
The secondary server could have multiple cast rippers running and could record internet radio shows, then once finished recording transfer it could send them over to my primary server to add to the website for people to download.
i recently find out that I don;t have an database backup for one of my biggest websites.
The database I'm talking about has 228 tables (198.6 MB)
In the backup file I only get this :
-- MySQL dump 10.11 -- -- Host: localhost Database: lxxxxxxa_sXXXl -- ------------------------------------------------------ -- Server version5.0.45-community-log
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */; /*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */; /*!40103 SET @OLD_TIME_ZONE=@@TIME_ZONE */; /*!40103 SET TIME_ZONE='+00:00' */; /*!40014 SET @OLD_UNIQUE_CHECKS=@@UNIQUE_CHECKS, UNIQUE_CHECKS=0 */; /*!40014 SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO' */; /*!40111 SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0 */;
The other databases I have tried are all ok, but none is this big. Is there any size limit ?
I have uploaded an printscreen with the setings of my WHM.
I have a centos server & whenever I reboot it, it goes into File System check and takes about 1 hr to turn online.
The irony is, I reboot the server only when the load goes high (esp when traffic is high).. And the server is down for long times when traffic is high.
The server config is pretty good, but it shows these problems once in 15-20 days.
I am using a Linux server together with Parallels v10.31 ... Unfortunately I get little or no real support from my host so and if I do it's cryptic.
I have been getting a large amount of emails from my server [hundreds daily]. I have attached a screen grab indicating type of email being sent. I have created only one cron job and that was to reset the RAM on a regular base.
Also is it safe to update to the latest version without a major disaster happening....
who you have used in the past to recover damanged hard drives that have been dropped. I got a client that damanged his HD, and it needs to be sent out to someone who is reliable is not gonna cheat and steal the data.
if someone have for mistake cancelled a cpanel account and in the same dir was the backup file of this account, should be possible to recovery at least the backup file from the deleted files? Or the entire dir cancelled?
I am trying to recover some backups on the server by rsync the home dir from BQbackup to my server. I deleted 1 file to see whether it actually works. I executing this command on the server:
I saw that it downloaded the file I deleted, however after checking on FTP if the file was recovered it actually wasn't. Is there something wrong in the command I used as it seems that it is not recovering any files.
Just wondering, since it appears to be hard to come by, but are there any providers that offer the option to use an automated system in order to provision new licenses for cPanel (or others?)
For example, you're setting up a VPS in the middle of the night, customer wants cPanel. You can't use the trial licenses via cpanel.net since they limit you to 3-4.
If your provider has an automatic API to bill and provision your license, you're good to go. If you don't...
Options? I'm mainly looking in Montreal (I know of Netelligent and Iweb, but both are manual povisioning).
It's not a make-or-break thing, but something nice to have.
