Questions regarding the hosting backup options

[shunx91]

Hi Guys.

I'm looking for a new server since my website has been down. Currently I'm using Cari.net and it's been quite unstable. Right now I'm looking at the Pro plan on hostgator.com. (Does anyone have any experience with this company?)

I am not really familiar with servers so I wanted to see whether or not this is a good plan for a forum that gets about 200-250 during peak hours. I am using a slower server with 2 gigs of ram and I don't know if it's the lack of server power that is causing the server to crash every so often.

Another thing that I wanted to see if what kind of backup system I need.

What is the recommended method of backup? How often and is it necessary for me to go in there and download all the files and backup the database on my own? Also, is automated backup needed if the server comes with that SATAII/RAID10 setup?

Please advise, thanks!

Tim

[encryption]

are you looking for a dedicated server ? 2 GB should be good as long you are not running a Celeron for a CPU

RAID is not for backups, its either for speed or for HD redundancy (depending on how you set it up). Use a program like MySQL dumper to take backups of your DB which are saved on your server. I take mine daily and then take an off server backup on my local PC once every week (this way if your server HD crashed killing all your backups and your DBs, you have an offline backup to fall back on)

[express]

With every company you hear good and bad, I have many good reviews on hostgator as they have been around for awhile. Make sure whatever host you go with they give you daily, weekly, and monthly backups, and then as encryption noted it is also good idea to at least do a daily backup of the dbs yourself with a cron job perhaps.

Joey

[Gene Steinberg]

With every company you hear good and bad, I have many good reviews on hostgator as they have been around for awhile. Make sure whatever host you go with they give you daily, weekly, and monthly backups, and then as encryption noted it is also good idea to at least do a daily backup of the dbs yourself with a cron job perhaps.

Joey

While most responsible hosts will do the backup, I would never depend on a third party for the fate of my data. I always backup my databases myself. With WordPress, for example, I have a plug-in that does it automatically (two databases) and emails the files to me every single day.

Is there such a mod for vBulletin? That would be better than cron, which can always fail

Peace,
Gene

[express]

First of all inside the vbulletin admin panel there is a place to setup the cron, however any client can ask their host to setup a root cron for this very easily or even in cpanel if they have that control panel, while we host 1000's of clients we do this all the time and the cron is very dependable and works quiet well.

[Gene Steinberg]

First of all inside the vbulletin admin panel there is a place to setup the cron, however any client can ask their host to setup a root cron for this very easily or even in cpanel if they have that control panel, while we host 1000's of clients we do this all the time and the cron is very dependable and works quiet well.

First lesson of backing up: Don't back up to the same drive as your other files are stored on.

It's easy to go to cPanel or the vBulletin Admin panel and manually download a copy of your database to your hard drive or some other location other than your Web server, but I'd like to see the same function performed automatically. Got some good ideas for those of us who who only muddle through Unix?

Peace,
Gene

[express]

Yes we have this option for clients over ftp. For our clients only though if they need it, most do not.

[Gene Steinberg]

Yes we have this option for clients over ftp. For our clients only though if they need it, most do not.

Well, that isn't terribly helpful now, is it.

Peace,
Gene

[alemcherry]

If you are on Raid, you can save the backups on same drive itself. use a cronjob for backingup the database and files. You may FTP it to a differnt location on weekly basis or something, for additional security.

[Joshs]

Make sure you off-site backups at least weekly.