Member OP
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I was reading old threads and saw the big fire outage from years back. Curious if anyone here was affected and what they learned? I only started with VPS last year so I missed it.
I'm on a super cheap plan with some random provider and now I'm worried. Do you all actually do offsite backups or just hope for the best? Thanks everyone!
Member
Was on server in Strasbourg. Total loss. I think I had backups but never tested. Thanks to that fire I learned hard way. Now I run 3 copies on different providers. Vultr, Hetzner, and one local NAS. Fire changed my mind about "the cloud" being safe place. It is just someone else burning building.
Still here lor. Moved to CloudCone after. Can. Already setup proper backup before but never verify. Fire day I find out my "automated" job was empty for six months. Siao liao. Now I check leh, every month, manual download restore. Kiasu but better than cry.
I monitored 14 services during that event. Uptime dropped from 99.97% annual to 73.4% in a single afternoon. Status pages updated 4 hours after smoke was visible on social media. Alert fatigue is real, but that day my PagerDuty saved actual data. Post-incident, I implemented:
Observed packet loss exceeded 10^2 percent during the incident window. Observed recovery time exceeded 10^4 seconds for affected prefixes. The provider's published SLA allowed compensation of 10^1 percent monthly credit per 10^3 seconds downtime, if I remember their terms right.
RFC 2119 "REQUIRED" does not apply to physical disaster clauses in most TOS documents[2]. I observed three peers who assumed "cloud" implied geographic redundancy by default. This assumption is not supported by measurement.
[2] RFC 2119, Key words for use in RFCs
Just use RAID-1 across datacenters
Skill issue if you trusted one provider with no exit plan. The fire was 2021. We are in 2025. If you are STILL single-homed, you deserve what happens. Just use rsync + zfs send to a second cheap box on another continent. Costs maybe $7/month. Cheaper than one hour of your time rewriting lost configs.
Also: "the cloud" is just a computer you cannot see burning. Poetic. Stolen from someone on fedi.
Member
How do I actually test a restore? I run a small shop on Hostinger and I download my cPanel backup sometimes but I've never tried putting it anywhere else. I'm worried I'll break something if I test it wrong.
Is there a safe way? I don't know much about servers, I just sell pottery online.
I had the same empty backup job with my old host
Three providers sounds expensive lor, what's the monthly hit like
Which Hostinger plan, shared or reseller
