I'm waiting on an email from sales on this question, so I thought I might ask the users here what you feel is the best plan of action for backing up your mysql database.

I don't know how often Hostony backs up a user's db, but I suspect it may be only once per week.

If our database gets rather large, which it will once our site gets going, I forsee having to backup and download a 2 GB file once or twice daily as our site will be very active, with people putting items for sale into the db.

If that's the case, I see two problems.

1. It will put a load on the server, since I'm sure the database isn't running on a seperate database server, as it should.

2. Transferring a 2GB file to a remote site twice a day will eat up a lot of our allotted bandwidth, if they count that towards our bandwidth usage per month. That's around 120GB per month.

We can't afford to lose even a half days worth of data.

It would be nice if they were running RAID 5 or network storage, but I don't believe that they are.

So, I was wondering what others do or suggestions you might have for us. I've never used a hosting service for a business website before and don't know where the division of responsibilites are as far as backing up our database on their servers.

We don't want to use RAID 5 because if there will be a very little misconfiguration between two drives (let it be 40Gb each one - not too much), synchronization process will take up to 4 hours. We can't afford 4 hours downtime because of RAID.
And as I know misconfiguration of data between drives is very widespread problem.

Aww come on... Thats not the reason. Espeicially if you bought the right stuff. Most hardware raid controller setup does the re-syncs while online, most enterprise grade raid are hot swappable (=no downtime).

4 hours down time > 2 days down time.


Also, it would be nice to see all the questions answered.


snorkelface, expect to pay more for those those services. Also, some hosts do not count FTP traffic logged on with the default admin traffic as part of the monthly BD limit. I noticed my updates are being counted... oh well... I guess I have use 80gb's sparingly...

Thanks supergodoffunk,

It seems that if you ask more than one question at a time, only one gets answered.

I've always workded with large (read Fortune100 companies) web and database servers, where we used either RAID 5 storage for small critcal servers to Network storage devices over fiber channel for larger critical servers, where you can't afford any downtime.

But, you know what, they were more expensive to buy and setup, but I'll tell you one thing that people like Hostony can't seem to get it through their heads, and that is;

1. Your uptime improves drastically, which makes your users happy.

2. You increase your reliability drastically, which makes your user happy.

3. You have less maintenance, which makes your sysadmins happy.

4. You have less headaches, which makes everyone happy.

5. Your users don't bad mouth you, causing you to lose future customers.

6. It's a lot faster, which makes your users happy.

So, why anyone would use standard disk drives in a business environment for servers is beyond me. Regular IDE drives were not made to stand up to the stress that a web or database server puts it to.

Anyway, do you know how oftern Hostony backs up a user's db?

On Cpanel there is an option for backiing up the databsae and downloading that file. Is that counted in your monthly bandwidth allowance? If so, do you use a different way? You mentioned ftping a backup?