Amity takes backup two steps further

16th June, 2014 in Hosting

Backup, backup, backup!  We always hear about it and we all know the importance of it.  So many companies still don't do it (or do it satisfactorily anyway!) At Amity we take backup seriously.  We know that, in the very unlikely event that any of our servers were to have major issues, we may need to rely on our backups to get going again quickly.  It's not just our customers who would be affected, but Amity's good reputation too.  So at Amity we take backup seriously and go two steps further than most other companies to ensure our customers' websites are backed up:  

Server host backup (server level)
We use industry leading server provider for our web hosting and email servers. In our many years of experience with web hosting, Linode have so far been the most reliable and efficient servers we’ve used. We do not often experience issues with Linode. But in the event something major does happen, all our Linode servers use their server backup system that takes a snapshot of each server every night, and makes it available to re-deploy to a new server quickly. What this means is, in the event of a major server issue, we can just use the previous nights snapshot to restore the server to a new server and be up and running quickly. This has never happened, but we have it just in case. 3 backups are saved - the previous night, the previous Sunday, and the Sunday before that.

Amazon S3 Backup (account level)
We then also take per account backups and store them on Amazon S3. A full backup is taken once per week (on Sundays) and then incremental backups taken each night. A per account backups means each customer’s web hosting account is backed up and saved on Amazon S3 separately from everyone else’s. So in the event of a major issue on a customer website (and not server wide), we can restore a customer’s web hosting account from backup to the previous night’s state. This has also never happened! But we have it just in case. We retain the backup files for 14 days.

Office Backup (file level)
Each server is additionally backed up to our office server on a per file basis. That is, all files and databases for a customer’s website are saved to our office server, so in the event of a file or database issue we can restore that customer’s individual file and database. We store files for 14 days. What this means is, if a customer accidentally deletes a file (perhaps an image), we can easily restore it for them within 14 days of the deletion. This backup we have and still do use, we do occasionally have requests to restore files which customers have accidentally deleted from their account. It’s a fantastic service.

Load Balancing Servers
We can even go one step further and offer Load Balancing servers for customers upon request. Load Balancing is having two servers that mirror each other, and distribute the load equally between the two mirrored servers. This setup means even if a server would fail, the customers sites are still up and being serviced from the second mirrored server whilst the first one is restored. Load balancing is available upon request.

Also available upon request (or using the web hosting control panel) is the ability for customers to receive a backup file of their website account to give even further peace of mind.

Note - all 3 backup processes are only applicable to our new Linode servers. We do have several older servers not with Linode that do not benefit from the Amazon S3 backup, but do have server and file level backups.

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