Disaster plan - what if the hosting provider goes bust?

daymobrew

I was recently asked how one would recover if your Irish hosting provider went bust.

I explained that it should be just a matter of getting space on another hosting provider and uploading the files (from a local backup) to that new setup.
For the URL, I am confident that the original provider would be helpful with transfers.

Is my faith in Irish hosts well founded? Would it likely happen how I described?
Speculative replies welcome.

mneylon

I can only speak from our perspective

As long as you have always have a fresh local copy of your site and the domain details are kept up to date ie. that the contacts are correct and accessible, then you shouldn't have any issues

steve-hosting36

I guess some providers would be more at risk than others, but, assuming your site or application is not overly complicated, the simple way to protect yourself is to spread the risk.

Take an account or server from a second provider, set everything up, but don't move your domain name. You could possibly even use something like Rsync to maintain the content on the second location (so it's kept in sync with your primary).

Then, if anything happened the provider, simply change the DNS.

For more complex, or larger deployments, you would have a contract with the host that would deal specifically with such a scenario.

AARRRGH

I have an account with bqbackup.com which I use with rsync to back up the contents of my server. It's all automatic so I don't need to think about it.

Basically as long as you have your sites/server backed up somewhere, it is easy enough to move to a new server. You will probably have a few days downtime though (especially as the IEDR are closed on weekends and appear to use a paper based system.)

mneylon

AARRRGH wrote: »

You will probably have a few days downtime though (especially as the IEDR are closed on weekends and appear to use a paper based system.)

They're now doing zone reloads 7 days a week which has helped with some things, though they're still driving me nuts with others:
http://www.isquattedyour.eu/2008/09/29/has-the-time-come-to-redelegate-ie-namespace/

steve-hosting36

One option, rather than having to change your DNS, is to use the DNS of the domain registrar (enom for example) or a third party DNS service, rather than the hosts.