Last week, in an email that began with the words "in an effort to keep you, the customer, better informed about important events" - my web host informed me of a raid-disc failure that resulted in total loss of all my websites on that server.
There are no backups - despite claims on their website that my data was protected with Raid-1 discs and daily Veritas tape backups, a statement which appears to be a lie.
I am now starting to do XOOPS sites and I need something better than this, either as a service level agreement or as part of the service. Any recommendations would be appreciated.
I am looking for a host with a reseller account that will:
1) Guarantee to perform daily backups of my websites and MySQL databases and guarantee that these will be safe if the web/database server bursts into flames or gets hacked to death by the 'un-root crew'.
2) Guarantee to restore all my sites, a specific domain, database, folder (or even a single file if I want) within an agreed timeframe from the previous day's backup.
3) Provide backups as part of the contract and undertake restores either under the contract, or on demand for a fixed fee.
Nearly all the shared and VPS solutions I have looked at make a big deal about one-click backups - but they are all stored on the same physical drive or machine. Even my own PC backups go onto CD then into a fire-safe. I need my host to do better than that.
The most promising solution I have seen up to now is
Hotchilli Data Vault but I would be interested to know of anything similar.
For Linux hosting I need:
PHP 4.*
GetText
IonCube run-time loading
Smarty
GD2 (ImageMagik would be nice)
MySQL 4.* (InnoDB)
Decent allocation (pref unlimited) MySQL DBs
PHPMyAdmin
CGI
Cron
SSH
Decent amount of space on a fast server
No 777 folder restrictions
Decent backbone, speed and uptime
Decent bandwidth allowance
Email + webmail per domain with decent POP box allocation
CPanel (preferred)
UK host with a telephone number
Credit card billing (auto if additional services purchased)
Paper invoices
Online account/invoice checking
Ticket and telephone tech support (not a call centre)
Happy to consider shared or VPS. Dedicated probably too expensive for me at present.
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