I'd like to back one of our servers up using S3 but I'm not sure the best way to go. Server is using CPanel. Obviously I want to keep costs down.
I need the files to be secure, backups need to be nightly incremental, and I need to be able to restore to another CPanel server fast in case of hardware failure. CPanel supports FTP for backups. I currently back up to another server, but I want to move to the cloud.
Specific questions I have:
1. Any recommendations on a cloud backup service (S3, Rackspace, etc?), and why?
2. Any recommendations on tools? I want this to be simple to set up. As easy as setting up an FTP account.
3. Is there another option I should consider? That server has about 62GB of data on it to be backed up.
I need to have a windows PC on my internal network connect via sftp and download the generated backups on my webserver.
What files do I need?
I'd like to do it on a daily basis as I run local tape backups every night.
My backups are being put into /backup/cpbackup/daily/ but there is a tarball, dirs/, and files/.
Do I just need to download the tarball? I was hoping to do this with psftp and the windows task manager so that I wouldn't have to do it manually every day.
We have a dedicated server with CPanel/WHM. It appears that the CPanel/WHM backup portion of the control panel is not functioning properly, as we just had an incident where all mySQL databases were deleted from the system and the last backup we had was from 03/31/08. This is not acceptable, as we need to have atleast at the min. weekly backups done of our system.
We are in need of a FREE 3rd Party (preferrably open source) solution where we can install on our Linux CentOS system to be able to have backups, and would like to have this software preferrably be able to backup to a remote location, but this is not required.
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.
if I should continue paying an extra $25 per month for Cpanel. Is it that hard to do without it? All I really do with Cpanel is configure Spamassassin, setup emails, and backups.
we are about to launch the public version of our website, and we are having trouble deciding which type of server to start with. We've reading a lot and contacting all providers to get a quote, but we haven't been able to take a decision. Maybe somebody with more experience can help us...
- most of our users are going to be (for the time being) in Spain. We plan to move to other markets in the future, but not before one year.
- we understand that the server location (or it's IP address) is important in terms of SEO, that's why we've been looking into spanish providers or providers that offer spanish IPs. This SEO thing is the main reason we have ignored Amazon ec2, which, on the paper, seems to be a very good option for websites that expect to increase their traffic rapidly.
- we are going to start with very few users, but we expect to be in >5000 users/day very soon. Hopefully, we will keep a steady growth for the next months, but this is something we can't anticipate for sure.
- our website is based on PHP&MySQL. Each user consumes quite a lot of memory, and queries to the database are very frequent and quite heavy in processing. On the local version (iMac - 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - 2GB RAM), a typical query from a single user takes around 2 seconds. We still have to do some optimization, but there is not much room for it left...
- our budget is 150-200 Euro/Month, but we would be able to increase it in case we find out it is needed in order to have a decent website.
- we are no experts in Linux sys-admin, but we can do the basic stuff, such as installing, configuring Apache, etc.
Therefore, we need 'something' that is powerfull enough to satisfy our users and that is easily&transparently scalable in case we have a sudden increase of users. From our readings on this forum and others, we understand that VPSs are not powerfull enough for us. On the other hand, dedicated servers are not easy to adapt to an increase in the number of users. Finally, in Spain we have found that Arsys is offering what they call 'cloud server', which looks similar to Amazon's ec2. We haven't been able to find any objective review on this Arsys offering, so we don't know how good it is. Anyone has worked with this system?
I noticed some cloud computing service providers, like, amazon, gogrid, etc. are all based on XEN server, is there any provider offers cloud computing on real dedicated server?
another question is, anyone knows the difference between traditional cluster and cloud computing. I did not see big difference based on their own description.
