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Which would you rather have with a backup server?
Metered 100Mbps port (enough to download your total disk space 4 times) or unmetered 20Mbps?
For example, if you had a 100GB plan with the metered option you'd have 400GB bandwidth, with the unmetered option you'd have 6.6TB of bandwidth if you maxed out the 20Mbps port for 30 days straight. 400GB is a lot of bandwidth if you are utilizing rsync or a similar method but for FTP transfer which moves all of the data every transfer that 400GB doesn't last very long.
So please chime in with what you prefer, why you would prefer it, and which plan you would pay more/less for. Also feel free to point out any flaws in my above example. Thanks!
Comments
Perhaps metered 100Mbps standard with an upgrade option for unmetered 20Mbps?
Some people wouldn't need that 6.6TB and would rather have quicker backup/recovery times; others might need to shuffle some backups to multiple servers..
metered 100mbps.
Metered 100mbit with an option for the 20mbit seems to work for both of the options, no?
I'd personally go for the metered 100M, waiting on backups sucks.
Awesome responses so far. Is it safe to assume none of you use FTP as a backup method (we have a lot of clients that do this unfortunately).
I'll take the faster, metered port any day of the week. If all goes as it should, I shouldn't have to download them anyways. But I do want my backups to be fast when I do need them - if I need to restore from a backup, especially if it's a full backup, it generally means that I need it, and I need it now. I wouldn't mind an option to temporarily boost your speed past 100mbps for restoring, perhaps as a one-off fee, but of course, that would require either bonded NICs or a gig-e port.
If the backup size is not much, and not frequently downloaded, I'd choose 100mbit metered.
But if the backup is frequently, I'd choose 20mbit unmetered.
Altough not many people would need 20mbit unmetered (except for Rapidleecher
)
I have a VPS with 10TB and 100mb unmetered from different provider but I just use maximum 4TB of it
I think that the only option cPanel WHM gives you for remote backups is FTP. It will FTP a compressed backup of each account every day.
True, you can do a local backup and then rsync it, but cWHM doesn't use --rsyncable on its gzip.
And of course, if you stage local backups, you end up halving your sellable space. If you use cWHM's remote FTP backup, then it does a create-tarball, FTP tarball, remove tarball cycle, so you only need to reserve enough space as your largest customer.
Yes, you can do your own MySQL backup, rsync /home, but (a) it's perhaps beyond the sysadmin skills of some web hosting companies, and (b) rsync is explicitly not supported as a backup means by cPanel (only their backup is supported).
unmetered 20Mbps
my backups are cron, so dont care if slower a bit. just important that i can transfer as often as i want without worry of bandwidth.
Unmetered without a doubt. For me data storage is about redudancy, and even though we live in a instant gratification society I personally wouldn't be in any rush to get my data. I'd sleep better at night known i'm able to download all my data multiple times slowly, rather than a few times quickly.
Turtle wins the race kinda deal
@NickM @taipres excellent points. What if I combined your thoughts into something like this:
20Mbps unmetered but we can remove the speed limit for 1 off emergencies (i.e. restores, need a full backup before maintenance, etc...).
That would probably work. Could it be done via SolusVM without requiring a ticket?
Yeah that sounds good to me. That kind of setup would of been perfect for myself a year or so ago when my power supply died and wrecked my hard drive, losing gigs of my source code in the process. I Had some backed up but it still hurt. Actually just today I read about a woman who lost all her data because her dog ripped her laptop powercord out. Her techie boyfriend wasn't able to retrieve anything, so I think backup servers are becoming more and more needed. I recommended her the big boys in the space, but to be honest your prices are a lot better than Dropbox and about even to Google drive.
Unfortunately it wouldn't be easy since SolusVM is closed source but we'll have our replacement eventually (I keep saying this but I've yet to bring my dev server home with me to work on it).
Thanks, unfortunately our services aren't the most user friendly for non-techie people which is why I push for home users without a lot of knowledge to get a solution that comes with an app/GUI (although this has been something we had been working on in the beginning and just put it on the back burner when the LEB thing took off on us).
Some of our backup clients I do a lot of hand holding and custom scripting to work with their setups but it's not something I can continue doing as we grow bigger and bigger. Maybe I'll create some OS templates with WebDAV.
metered 100Mb and you can write a small tutorial about backup, rsync duplicity or duplicati under windows.
Here's an oddball -- can you do a split -- 20 Mbps to backup server/100 mbps from backup server? I agree absolutely with @NickM that when you need it, you need it NOW, but for automated/backgrounded backups, it doesn't matter if it runs a little longer. Also, most folks not on a VPS/corporate network and/or geographically close/well-peered to your DC will not be able to fill a 100 mbps pipe when backing up. On the other hand, that's easy when downloading with multiple streams (http/ftp/bbcp/pick your flavor).
OT: I currently use Mediafire (yes, them) as one of my archival destinations -- $60 a year gives you oodles of space, with a 7GB max filesize limit. Uploads automated with plowshare are anywhere from 200k/sec to 10Mbytes/sec, depending on the source/location, but downloads can be bursted to 20Mbytes/sec+ with any old http download manager. Works great, although so far I've only had to download to verify that the uploads were correct
Unfortunately SolusVM doesn't have a setting for upload speeds so we're kind of stuck with one speed for both at the moment. As it stands now a lot of our backup clients max out their 100Mbps ports but run out of bandwidth before the month is over and not only can they not backup anymore, their VPS is suspended making restoring impossible also. So far we've had one client switch to an unmetered port to avoid this but was wondering if we should drop the metered port altogether or make it an option.
My suggestion would be doing this via a WHMCS module and using the Solus API. A one-off payment that gives X hours uncapped (recapped possibly via cron, or upon expiration). That's how I got around many of Solus' crippling limitations before we started on Stallion :P
@KuJoe: a couple of lines of
tcscripting per VPS would do the trick -- perhaps SolusVM could automatically be set to invoke the shell script at creation with the assigned IP?Metered 100mbps with option to temporarily switch to 20mbps unmetered etc OR VICE VERSA (with an option to switch between the two via support tickets)
Some backup providers have metered VMs but they allow full 100mbps (temporarily) to download stuff off their VM for restoration etc.
I NFS mount storage to a WHM box as /backup and WHM runs rsync for uncompressed backups, and symlinking for multiple versions, in a rsnapshot type way I imagine
As for @KuJoe's question, I simply ask clients to rate limit to 50mbit while uploading backups, and in the event they need to restore, just send me a ticket that it is happening so I don't freak when I see 500mbit of traffic from them. But let them fly unmetered on the gbit link.