Offsite Hosting/Meeting Notes 2017-05-08

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
  • Mark Steffen has techniques for redundant backup storage (good for ransomware attacks, &c.)
  • How much backup do you need?
    • How much data can you afford to lose?
    • Have at least one automated backup in place