Cost effective backup server provider

Vendoz

Hello! I'm looking for a good storage VPS at honest prices in EU, only for backups (so I mainly need space).

I am currently using AlphaVPS, but unfortunately I noticed that their node in Germany is located inside the Hetzner datacenter, which is a provider I am already moving my production machines to, and I don't like to "depend" on a single provider (I know that they will have separate equipment for sure, but I still prefer that they don't share anything).

I bought a machine from AlphaVPS in Sofia too, but compared to the German one it's unusable (writes 150MB/s vs 800MB/s), and the support told me "it's normal, you'll see that it's fine", lol (spoiler: it's slow). I know AlphaVPS also have a datacenter in the UK, but because of GDPR it's a pain, so I'd avoid it.

So here I am asking you if you rely on some provider for VPS storage at good price, that is neither Hetzner nor AlphaVPS.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Thomas_W

Vendoz I use AlphaVPS in Germany and Hetzner, but in different Datacenters. Here in Thailand where I am based I just got a fixed IP (1/1 Gbps fibre) at the office and setup a Backup Server at the office for the Server in Thailand. There I will also catch the backups from AlphaVPS and sent Backups from Thailand to AlphaVPS.
This allows me a fast Backup/ Restore in a normal case, because the Enhance Backup Server is both times in the same network with the App/DB Server.
And on the another hand, I have a independant Backup that will takes a longer time for latency issues, but will be not connected with the panel and not physically, the same company or even continent.

webnestify

What's wrong with Hetzner?? 🙂

Vendoz

webnestify Hetzner is great, but have backup and webserver on the same provider isn't the best idea in the world ):

SharedGrid

Netcup do VPS you can add seperate block storage to, expandable up to 10TB.

Vendoz

SharedGrid Netcup seems good, it has Vienna which is great. Do you use it? Is expandable storage raid/SSD or simple HDD?

Steamon

Backup should always be placed outside the datacenter or seperate then your hosting is located. I went for a own server solution at a partner that has servers at home with firewall and ip block and only needed to buy 4 TB datacenter ssd of samsung. Solved it that way and cheaper then any datacenter solution and yes the backup server is backup aswell.

gmakhs

Hetzner is great though some of my server there get random reboots from power issues, i keep the critical services on OVH, double the price for the hardware but atleast some of the server there have 1800 days of uptime

SharedGrid

Vendoz yes I use it. I can't find any info if it's SSD or HDD so I would assume it's HDD, we've never seen any performance issues.

alexavalos

NetCup has good value for money.
Every now and then they put promotions in which they double the storage of their RootServer.
I hired in the promotion they had in February one with 3TB and so far everything right.

gmakhs

alexavalos yeah i believe they operate at lower profit margin to get market share, they don't look bad

rdbf

We moved away from AlphaVPS due to severe hardware performance issues on some locations (Sofia especially), and occasional massive drops in performance (think 1MB/s R/W) on their Germany location. Not sure what's happening with their setups, but not waiting around to find out.

Although not EU, we moved to Servarica in Montreal, Canada.

5 USD/month
2 core
2GB ram
2TB HDD
12TB up / unlimited down @ 1gbps OR unlimited up/down @ 250mbps
ipv4 + ipv6 (on request at chat)

Their SAN storage options are pretty great as well.

dalet11

rdbf I have both Serverica and AlphaVPS today. In my case, Serverica has lower performance. Sometimes the I/O and network performance is so poor that I'm getting disconnected from SSH, and backups fail.

AlphaVPS in Sofia performed poorly, but since moving to their DE location, it has been working great with pretty stable performance.

I guess it truly depends on the node you're assigned to.

cPFence

rdbf

dalet11

Yes, AlphaVPS can sometimes show clunky performance, but that’s kind of expected at their price point. As long as backups don’t fail, we don’t worry too much even when the VPS load spikes. So far, we haven’t had backup failures with them (tested on both DE and US locations), but yeah, load can get pretty high at times.

JohnB

Backblaze has extremely good performance and their whole business is reliability. Probably not the cheapest. They have s3 compatible API

gmakhs

JohnB only problem with s3 is that enhance integration is not good yet, once it works properly most will use some s3 providers

nqnoc

gmakhs what are the current issues with S3 backup?

xyzulu

gmakhs once it works properly most will use some s3 providers

I'm not sure I agree with this statement, though you are allowed your own opinion. Most people don't fully grasp why the Enhance backup system is so superior to using s3. To many, s3 seems simpler, but it is in the end more expensive and less efficient and easy to use. Even if/when s3 is incremental, it's still going to be vastly inferior to the built in Enhance backup system.

Some side points:

If you have a small number of website.. ie 5, perhaps s3 is just simpler to setup.
If you are not really a server admin, you probably will be drawn to s3 first. It's a shame, but we can't "spoon feed" everything to these kinds of people who are likely to end up in more of a mess not knowing how to properly secure and manage their own servers, whichever panel they choose to run.

twest

xyzulu other than people with very small numbers of sites, I really don't see what people find so attractive about S3 backups.

When S3 is incremental, it's a coin toss it the backup system is using local resources to run the incremental check, or if it uses S3 resources... The last time I used Jetbackup incremental on S3 I got a $300 charge for 1 days backups, just from the millions upon millions of queries it was running on AWS checking for file changes, 90% of the cost was from queries lol

Object storage sucks if you have to manually grab files too. Most places don't have an easy utility for zipping "folders" on S3 (I actually only know of 1 that does, Wasabi, but they suck for other reasons like charging you for 90 days of storage on any file you upload, so you will incur huge costs every day from your retention settings). At least on Enhance backup server if you need to manually grab something it's extremely simple to ssh in, cd to a folder, zip what you want, then wget from the other server.

Heck, even for small numbers of sites if it's important enough might as well throw down for a little VPS instead of S3.

Kosta

S3 will be good as to have server backups send into bucket to have second place for times when backups server dies or dc shuts us down to be able to continue using backing up without interruption until we provision replacement for server backup…
Instead of backing up our backup servers with scripts etc…