Does your VPS plan include backups? (provider poll inside)

Hey everyone! 😊 I was shopping around and realized backup policies are all over the place. Some hosts include them, some charge per snapshot slot, some just shrug and say "you're on your own."

Quick poll for you all:

• Included free backups? What's the retention?
• Paid snapshot add-on? How much per slot?
• Full DIY (rsync, rclone, another VPS)?

I'll start: I'm on a Contabo KVM plan, 2 weekly backups included, 3 restore points kept. But here's the thing—did you test your restore? I learned the hard way last year. A "backup" you can't restore is just an expensive hope.

My checklist for any host:

• 3 copies of data (prod + backup + offsite)
• 2 different media/types
• 1 offsite minimum

What's your setup?

Contabo includes 2 weekly backups on their KVM-2 and above, but only 1 weekly on KVM-1. Retention is exactly 3 restore points, stored on the same Ceph cluster as production. I confirmed this with their support ticket #48291 on 2026-04-03.

My current stack:

• Provider snapshots: disabled. I do not trust single-tenant snapshot restore times.
• Restic to Backblaze B2, daily at 02:00 UTC, 30-day retention.
• Quarterly restore drills to a spare OVHcloud NAT VPS (€4/month, 256 MB RAM, sufficient for validation).

Recommendation: budget 15-20% of your VPS cost for independent backup storage. A $5/month VPS deserves $1/month in actual backup infrastructure.

Same ceph cluster is the problem right there

Contabo specs for that money you get:

• KVM-2: €6/mo, 2 vCPU (E5-2680v4), 4GB RAM, 80GB NVMe
• Backup "included" but same rack, same network, same ceph pool
• For that money you get a used Dell R730xd off auction, 12x 4TB HGST NAS drives, RAID-Z2
• Add a €35 Atom C2550 at OVHcloud for offsite ZFS send

My current dedi:

• 2x Xeon E5-2660v3
• 64GB DDR4 ECC
• 6x 2TB WD Gold, RAID-Z1 (I know, I know, but it's lab stuff)
• zfs snapshots every 15min, syncoid to Hostinger box in another city

Provider snapshots are convenient until they aren't

52 boxes across 9 providers and I can tell you exactly who charges what

Included free:

• Vultr: daily on 2GB+ plans, weekly under
• Hetzner: "nightly backups" but they lost my backup node same day as prod node in march, RIP 3 years of plex metadata
• RackNerd: none, zero, zip

Paid snapshots:

• InterServer: $2/slot/month, max 3 slots, $6 to keep 3 copies
• GreenCloudVPS: $1.50/slot, but their panel snapshot takes 20 min to create on a 1GB plan

DIY math:

• Cheapest backup VPS I found: OVHcloud NAT, 128MB, €4/mo
• rclone to wasabi: $6.99/TB, my 52 boxes total ~400GB actual data = $2.80/mo
• $/GB/RAM winner is still DIY by miles

That Hetzner thing still stings, both nodes same proxmox cluster, admin typo'd a ceph rm command

Ouch, Hank, sorry to hear about Hetzner We actually had similar issue back in 2024, learned hard lesson. Now our backup nodes are separate cluster, separate datacenter, separate network uplink. Made test order myself last week to verify!

Vultr current policy:

• 1GB plans: weekly backup, 2 restore points
• 2GB and up: daily, 7 restore points
• All stored on different Ceph cluster in different suite, same city though (working on second city for 2027)

Snapshot add-on is $1.50 per slot, max 5 slots. But honestly? If you need 5 snapshots maybe look at bigger plan or DIY with rsync. Sent ticket yesterday to ask about ZFS send/recv support, not ready yet.

For students or small projects: included daily on 2GB is usually enough if you test restore! I do mine every month, found broken backup once before customer did.

Cheers

IMO the "included vs DIY" debate misses the middle ground. YMMV, but I run a mix:

• Important stuff: provider backup + DIY restic to B2
• Lab/play stuff: provider only, or nothing
• Client stuff: always DIY, always tested, always encrypted

Take it with a grain of salt, but I've seen too many "unlimited" backup promises turn into "we're deprecating this feature" emails. One provider I won't name had "free backups" for 2 years, then suddenly $3/mo with 2 weeks notice.

Hank's $/GB math is solid for bulk. For single small VPS, provider included might be cheaper than your time to maintain scripts. Depends what you value.

If I'm on a €3/mo NAT VPS from OVHcloud, the cheapest backup option is just... another cheap VPS somewhere else? I don't think I can run restic on 128MB RAM, it OOMs when I tried

Is there something lighter than rclone? I just have like 5GB of actual stuff, mostly notes and a tiny website

Thanks everyone for all the details btw, this is super helpful!

Same Ceph cluster doesn't mean same pool though

How much is that OVHcloud NAT VPS again

What kernel is the Atom C2550 running?