Offsite Hosting/Meeting Notes 2017-05-08

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Offsite Hosting Meeting Notes

  • Introductions
  • Selecting a hosting provider
    • There's no "One size fits all"
    • What do you need?
      • Disaster recovery?
      • Microsoft licensing?
  • What kinds of servers for a host?
    • Dell servers at one plc
    • Had HPs, didn't mind
    • Lenovo, but there was BIOS based malware
      • Liked IBM servers, anecdotally liked the reliability
    • indieServe has all Lenovo servers
      • Also has some HP servers for colocation
  • indieServe is hosting for KWLUG, KWVoIP, FairvoteWRC, KWPeace, &c.
  • Problems?
    • Shared hosting was OK for a while, but host was asking for more money
    • Other company, seems perfect shared hosting (using WordPress),
      • Works today, but lots of complaints on Facebook, so he no longer trusts
    • Backups?
      • Yes, keeping your own backups in addition to using the hosts' backups
  • indieServe Networks
  • About $10/month for shared host
  • No limits but on the honour system
    • Keep it to one company per shared host
  • Local non-profits may be able to get really good deal -- talk to Mark Steffen
  • Also has VPS (Virtual Private Servers)
  • Can do hosted Windows servers or domain
    • Good for small file sharing systems
    • Microsoft has a specific licensing arrangement for hosting providers
      • Cost based on cores and sockets, plus number of customers
      • Not cheap, $100's /month
      • Similar model to Azure or Amazon AWS
  • Some customers use offsite hosting only for data replication (disaster recovery)
    • Do keep offsite backups encrypted
  • Cheap backup? 20c/GiByte for storage is typical
    • But try Duplicity for Linux
    • DupliCaddy for Windows (Open Source, Beta software,supports SQL, kinda slow)
    • Cloud Berry for backup service
      • For Windows, do full backup, then everything is incremental afterwards
      • But it keeps a synthetic "Full" in the background
      • With S3 or Azure, you can restore to EC2 -- get (almost) instant restore on external VPS -- really cheap disaster recovery
    • Back Blaze (personal backup for $5/month, also B2 backup storage, .02c/Gibyte?, $10/month for 1 TByte?)
  • For any backup solution check with Legal for PIPEDA legislation
  • indieServe keeps hard backups (USB drives stored offsite)
  • Backup horror stories
    • Hijacked truck
    • Encrypted backups corrupted
    • Bulk files corrupted
    • Tape backup is still the most dense storage for immutable backups