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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The article addresses this in the "Why not just do x?" section.

> - Why were you only hosting one JUST ONE cloud provider?

> - Why didn't you have backups outside of JUST ONE cloud provider?

Telling them to just use two cloud hosting providers sounds easy on paper but when you're a cash-strapped startup it's a significant ask. Especially if you need to have the same architecture replicated across both, in order not to have extended downtime.

This is much bigger issue than having external backups (which every startup should still do).

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But you don’t need the same architecture replicated across two providers, as your parent post demonstrated. Run Postgres in DO and upload your backups to S3/Azure Storage. This is both cheap and simple to the level that any startup could manage it. If and when it makes sense, you can investigate multi provider replication, but it might just be YAGNI.

These are strange times I guess? Maybe I'm a weird one-off, but I have 3 VPS providers for my hobby sites, my own DNS spread across all three (one remains shadow backup) and offline rsnapshot backups that automation can't touch.

I can't imagine doing less for a business. In my opinion, the business model and investment plan should account for all of this for at least the first five years.

Then save it locally as well? There really isn't an excuse to having DO or any provider being your sole backup.

Why is everyone talking about backups and not the actual infrastructure?

because that was the biggest issue in the original article, they didn't have backups of their data, so the company was dead. If they had had backups, they could have recreated the infrastructure.

They did have backups, only problem backups was also on DO. Backing up petabyte of data even on a Gbit connection is slow, and also cost more then a pennies if you for example back it up on AWS. Linus tech tips have a video on youtube explaining the problem.

The original post literally mentions "all our data (500k rows)" i.e. a data amount so small they could probably back it up to their cellphone every five minutes.

It's not really a "backup" if it's just on the same server/data center though. Moving data from one drive to another in the same machine, or from one machine to another in the same building, provides fault tolerance should the main drive/machine die, that's about it.

That's true whether the computer(s) is your own or someone else's.

It's all about threat model. And yes "our cloud provider accidentally deletes both our data and our backups" should be in the list.

Okay, but say you do get shutdown and you have your offsite backups, like most people. It's still a significant amount of work starting from scratch to rebuild and link all of your servers, dbs, services, etc. Plus all of the basic OS tweaking.

Losing your backups because your on one site is always dangerous. Getting completely kicked off your VPS systems with no warning or help is what's new and scary about this DO story.

No, it's not so difficult task and not even expensive. I don't think every project really needs it, though. But external db backups - they are ridiculously cheap and every project needs them.

Local backups? A few hard drives and a fiber connection can be cheap. Slow to restore, but not "killed my business" slow

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