Backup setup

leonardo

Hello everyone,

We're an agency and have recently started using Enhance to host our portfolio of over 600 clients on our own hosting platform (we right now have 7 clients on Enhance so not fully committed yet). I'm truly impressed with the community support on this forum, and it's been a tremendous help as I've been setting up our system over the past few weeks.

I've quickly learned a lot, thanks to the excellent documentation and insightful discussions here.

I do have a question: we currently have S3 backups connected through Backblaze, but I'm looking to set up a backup server role as well. Could anyone recommend a reliable and affordable VPS provider with good storage options? Or would it be better to go with a dedicated server? I'm aiming for a cost-effective solution as we continue to scale.

Thanks in advance for your input!

wenani

leonardo You can check alphavps.com vps storage. cPFence has a guide on Alphavps storage

vsmbg

leonardo I wouldn't count my backups on a small company. Take a look at OVH and Hetzner. We use servers from Hetzner and OVH to host the backups. S3 will be very expensive in the long term as it makes full daily backups, not incremental as if you use a separate server.

cPFence

leonardo

Welcome Leonardo to the community! While Hetzner is our chosen provider for servers and VPS, we have opted for AlphaVPS to have backups in another data center as a precaution. It's important not to put all your eggs in one basket. We have been using AlphaVPS for years for backups only without any issues.

leonardo

vsmbg thanks for the input!

wenani thanks for the input as well, I was not aware cPFence has Enhance tutorials, need to check them out! Awesome 🙂

wenani

vsmbg Well... everyone big was once small. For me I look at reliability than size.

pulse

We are using Contabo Storage VPS. We have no bad experience with them. Their price for GB is very good. In addition to that you can backup your backups to anotherwhere, see here: https://cpfence.app/how-to-backup-your-enhance-backups/
Bests

vsmbg

pulse Contabo is pretty cheap, I don't think anyone can beat them in the price battle. However, their service is terrible... We have a server that was purchased for a year and on the first month we lost access to it, can't be re-installed, nothing. It is not even showing in their control panel. We are sending them weekly mails and since like July nobody has ever replied 😃 I'm not joking, I wish I were.

leonardo

cPFence thanks! I will go over the tutorial you made, thanks for doing it! I already had one VPS with them so it's perfect to test it out 🙂

ClouderNode

Slicie.com is a good option also

btraill

Currently testing some servers from https://servarica.com/black-friday/#storage

Kosta

If you need backup server for 600+ clients get you own server hardware at your chosen DC forget about vps

leonardo

Kosta yup, as we start moving clients to our own hosting, I will be getting dedicated servers instead of VPS

Thanks for input

dalet11

We tried AlphaVPS as a backup server, but the IO was so slow that the backups failed every day. Their support did not respond in 2 days so we canceled it and got a physical server with 2X 8TB HDDs in RAID1 for the backups. It works like a charm, but it costs much more than a cheap VPS.
For us backups are critical so it is worth it, we prefer reliability.

rdbf

dalet11

They have huge variability within the same products, probably a mix of various generations of hardware depending on the datacenter. I tested 2, and in terms of read/write performance there was a 10-15x difference in I/O.

cPFence

dalet11 We tried AlphaVPS as a backup server, but the IO was so slow that the backups failed every day. Their support did not respond in 2 days so we canceled it and got a physical server with 2X 8TB HDDs in RAID1 for the backups. It works like a charm, but it costs much more than a cheap VPS.
For us backups are critical so it is worth it, we prefer reliability.

Yes, cheap storage VPS options often struggle with IO issues when exceeding 1 or 2TB. Still, you have two choices:

Get a dedicated server like the one you mentioned, this is the easier method.
Or, grab several 1TB VPSs (AlphaVPS works best with the Dallas, USA DC in our tests) and group your Enhance servers into smaller groups (easily managed using the Enhance group feature), with each group backed up to one of the VPSs.

We prefer option 2 to save money and avoid putting all our eggs in one basket, but others opt for a single big dedicated box for peace of mind.

Kosta

vsmbg If You want to build hosting company or web agency with own hosting , never go to other hosting provider to get a server always buy the server u like and place it at DC of your choice. Don’t bother at all you be loosing all your customers eventually. Obv the cost for server can be 5k to 125k depending what you building but it’s much cheaper (long term) to get loans from bank or government to fund your own IT Infrastructure. With good marketing even big servers can be quickly filled up with tenants to give you good profits. 3-5 years loans be paid off and you have all your servers in DCs of your choice and you pay only for electricity and uplinks. Don’t bother getting loans if you don’t have good marketing strategy, as you gonna loose all.
And never buy second hand, always look for latest technology like cpu, ram, nvme, uplinks of at least 2x10GBs per server etc.
We can play as much as we like with VPs for development other than that not good.
And by the way all your IT need to comply with ISO 27001, NIS2. Otherwise big penalties that gonna force you to close your company.

ivansalloum

Kosta Same like getting a Dedicated Physical Server from a provider.

Kosta

ivansalloum yep

Kosta

Last advice, build all your servers under MAAS , for your enhance cluster. And build OpenStack under that MAAS and you good to go to offer all you like to your customers and if you mange to get compliant with ISO 27001, 27017, NIS2 and PCIdss then you good to go to overtake major hosting and cloud providers 😉
Don’t forget use your own hardware and make sure you are the only one who can access physically the hardware!
Probably to start you gonna need 100k as minimum for MAAS and 200k for openstack hardware !