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One-Man Company Provider
Death is inevitable. How can you trust a one man vps provider for a production server if you are unsure of what might happen tomorrow. Have you taken this into consideration and just plans to move to another provider if this happens? What are your thoughts?
Comments
Same as a fully staffed company going under tomorrow. Yes, something may fall from the sky and strike me down at any time, that is why you make backups. One man or fully staffed, is the service good or not, the rest is unwarranted fear.
I suspect that most of these one-man companies have some sort of contingency plan that will go forth should anything ever happen to them, whether it be disease or death.
And there goes @miTgiB
@miTgiB mostly agree
@ihatetonyy quite the contrary I believe. I rather suspect that most one man shows actually don't. There is also very little motivation for them, from their own point of view. They might have some collateral or insurance to provide for family in case of death, disease, etc., but for a one man show, business continuation management from a customers' perspective is hardly a top priority. One man shows are usually way too busy to handle that on top of their day to day load. There are, however, customers who will want such a contingency plan - but they'd do it whether it is a one man show they deal with or a larger company (most of our corporate customers have such agreements with us, for example).
cheers -
oz.
You should have a contingency plan anyway if your server is that important. Single points of failure are a bad idea under any circumstances. Companies of all sizes fail every day and many of them do it suddenly for various reasons.
Even some big internet companies do it wrong IMHO, look at how many are wholly dependent on Amazon or Akamai.
If it's your livelihood you should have a plan of action for the possibility of a catastrophic loss of all the servers from one provider, whether that involves how to get a backup loaded on another server or knowing how to spin up an EC2 instance until you get set up somewhere else or keeping another LEB as a hot spare. It's a less stable market but there are plenty of things that could go wrong other than a company failing, e.g.
or a bazillion other things. None are particularly likely but if you're going to be majorly screwed if it were to happen you should be prepared.
@lbft : agree, and as to : whether that involves how to get a backup loaded
One can never stress enough how important that is. Backing up is one thing. Actually restoring data is another. Anything important should not only regularly be backed up, it should also regularly be restored to see if what one restores is what one expects.
cheers -
oz.
Backups (in general) are related to the acceptable downtime time which in turn play a role with the reasons for the backup:
the less is your ADT, more you are going to spend
and as @ozfingwe said whatever is your backup strategy, you need to verify peridiocally that it works 
S.