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Which would you like more: free backups or an upgrade to SSD storage?
We're evaluating which feature to bring into our KVM VPS next: free offsite backups (weekly and one on-demand slot) or a migration to SSD storage. Which would you prefer and why?
If it depends on the amount of SSD storage, let us know what amount would make you prefer SSD storage!
Free Upgrade? Oh yiss.
- Which would you like more: free backups or an upgrade to SSD storage?104 votes
- Free Offsite Backups - Weekly & one on-demand slot37.50%
- SSD Storage62.50%
Comments
It depends a lot on how the backups are handled. I have seen many providers just copying data around with no in-flight encryption (read FTP) and no on-disk encryption. In one case a provider did weekly backups with file encryption, had his servers compromised and found out he didn't backup his encryption key.
Its actually better for customers to be responsible for their own backups, then they can determine how they want their data transported and stored.
heh, i have to admit - i also once stored the wrong GPG key for my private backups in my keepass and was not able to recover it when checking backups one day and the server wiped it, had to wipe 5TB server backups and start over
Though, for a commercial service this is absolutely not acceptable, especially as you can just encrypt the key with another key+long pw and then store them both in google drive or something (send yourself an email, USB stick, CD, paste it on some pastebin, write it down/print it out, put photo of it on facebook, etc.).
Anyway, on topic, what kind of RAID is it now? Typical 4 HDDs in RAID10 or something like a 3disk RAID5/5 disk RAID6? If performance now is good (measured more in IOPS than R/W speed, 4 HDDs in R10 should give around 600 IOPS each way and ~150-200MB/s R/W) backups make more sense - If you are struggling with IO/IOPS already (like many small VPS on each node) SSDs make more sense.
Might also go the middle way if your RAID controller supports it or you have exp to do it in software: Get a single 250/500GB SSD as SSD cache for each node and reduce backups to weekly only. Might require RAID rebuild though and if you use the default crappy SolusVM KVM setup you can't really do SSD caching for LVM in SW.
This. But yeah i would take SSD over the backups personally.
Sounds like the best of both worlds. But the customer being able to have some power over his backup is mandatory imo. at least be able to disable the process.
SSD for me, since I think customers should take care of their data for every cases.
Grab a Dacentec $25 2x2TB box. and SSD. Cant cost thatmuch.
what happened to your last poll about free billing software?
We went with lower pricing instead.
A customer-friendly message when your WHMCS is down rather than a database error for days.
Auto Renewal on important things.
SSD Storage isn't always essential. In many cases, HDD storage is a perfectly adequate storing method. I personally would prefer the peace of mind of knowing my data is backed up to a remote/off-shore system.
SSD. Don't rely on a provider for backups. Make your own.
Backups need to be with a different provider anyway, so yolo and give us SSDs!
I chose SSD but does it really help for low traffic sites?
^^^^
Give same amount of storage as HDD.
Its been fascinating watching the poll. It keeps jumping back and forth between the two.
We're still evaluating our future features, but I have a good idea on how we're going to roll things out, but I'd still love more opinions.
@Steven_F, do both if not already suggested 'Clever look' -YA
I'd rather roll things out one at a time. Since forcing a migration to SSD would require some downtime (we could minimize this, but there will still be a minimum of a few minutes of downtime) and the backups will require extensive testing, rolling it all out at once would be a huge hassle.
We tried backups on Virtualizor, it never worked, so we'd like to make sure SolusVM not only handles it, but handles it well/properly.