The whole VPS can go up in smoke fairly easily too, quite literally in some cases. There were a couple of small VPS providers hit buy the fire that took out one of OVH's data centres and either had no backups or had the backups on other machines in the same building. Heck, many cheap VPS providers don't have a reliable backup system at all, some are honest about it (and tell users to manage their own backups) and some are less so. Also remember that a small VPS provider will have low staff because the margins are low, so if there is any manual intervention needed to restore services when there is a hardware failure you might find spinning up a new VPS elsewhere, restoring your own backups¹, and switching over DNS, is faster than the hosting providers restore process. And their backups are often daily, with your own you may be able to efficiently manage much more frequent (hourly, or even perhaps near real-time if your apps are not write-intensive) snapshots. You aren't going to get a 1-hour max restore and 1-hour max data-loss guarantee for $4/month!
Keep backups in any case. Preferably on another provider or at least in a different physical location. And, of course, test them.
And if you are managing a good backup regime, and monitoring your data/app anyway, is monitoring drives a significant extra hardship?
--
[1] in fact if you automate the restore process to another location, which I do for a couple of my bits, then you can just hit that button and update DNS when complete, and maybe allocate a bit more RAM+cores (my test mirrors are smaller than the live VMs as they don't need to serve real use patterns).
dspillett|3 years ago
Keep backups in any case. Preferably on another provider or at least in a different physical location. And, of course, test them.
And if you are managing a good backup regime, and monitoring your data/app anyway, is monitoring drives a significant extra hardship?
-- [1] in fact if you automate the restore process to another location, which I do for a couple of my bits, then you can just hit that button and update DNS when complete, and maybe allocate a bit more RAM+cores (my test mirrors are smaller than the live VMs as they don't need to serve real use patterns).