How To Setup A 3 Point, Fail Proof Backup System For Your VPS

I’ve worked online long enough to know backups are essential to your business.

If you’re running your own VPS then you best have a good backup system and disaster recovery plan in place as you never know what is going to happen!

By default, backups aren’t included in our VPS hosting packages, you must add them during initial sign-up.  Still though, I recommend having at least two more backups available for your own use.

Three Points Of Backups

• Off site server backups – Handled by Name Hero, order during sign-up.  Point and click restore from our interface.
• On server backups – Easiest to recover per account.  Retain as many days as storage will allow.  Point and click restore from inside of Web Host Manager.
• Amazon S3 backups – Securely send your nightly backups conducted by Web Host Manager to Amazon’s S3 service to allow for completely offsite, cloud backups.

Off Site Server Backups

When you order a VPS from Name Hero, you’ll notice during the order process, you can order nightly backups from us:

The above screenshot is for our Hero 2GB VPS and the backup quota is the cost per month.  The larger the server you buy, the more the backup plan is.

Each night, we’ll automatically backup your ENTIRE VPS and store the data on a separate machine.  If at any point you need to restore the data, you can simply login to the Name Hero control panel, and click restore next to the backup:

The only downside to these backups is you actually have to restore the entire server (not just one account).  Therefore it’s all or nothing.  Still, very good to have in your disaster recovery plan.

On Server Backups

Web Host Manager has a nice backup system built in that will automatically backup each account, the system files, and your mySQL databases nightly, weekly, and/or monthly.

By default it uses /backup mounted on your main storage volume.  The main benefit to doing this is you can easily restore just one account without restoring the entire server.

These backups can also be downloaded and extracted to local machine where you can find individual files, emails, or databases.  The only downside is they actually use up your local storage so if you have a lot of usage you may want to consider adding block storage (available at $29.95/mo per 100GBs).

Amazon S3 Backups

Finally, Web Host Manager has developed a module that allows the backups conducted on the server to also be automatically sent to their S3 cloud service.

This allows you to keep secure copies on a complete off-site cloud location and restore them incase of disaster.  The good thing about Amazon S3 is the service is very cheap ($5/month goes a long way) and you can also provide public links to your data so your co-workers / partners can have access to the data.

I’ve personally used these many of times when I need to download the latest backup and sort though some files on my local computer vs. being online.

How To Setup Your Backups

Setting all of this up is very easy, but it would be a lot to follow if I typed it out.  I decided to film the entire process from sign-up to setup to give you a better idea:

If you have any questions or need our team to help setup – just ask!

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.