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How do you trust storage VPS from LET vendors?
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How do you trust storage VPS from LET vendors?

PepeSilviaPepeSilvia Member
edited January 2017 in General

I mean I can see trusting Amazon/Dropbox/Google/Microsoft with your archive data. Things like photos, documents, videos etc that you accumulate during the years. Even if they go out of business, you know they're very likely to let you download it all first.

Same with backups. All of my production sites, several hosted with LET vendors, all of them back up to Amazon S3. S3 is very cheap, but I suspect I can still save some money if I get a storage VPS from one of the vendors here.

But the issue I have is almost any of them can shut down and close up shop without a notice. A large number of them are 1-2 man operations, which I have no problems with, but I can't trust them with data I cannot afford to lose.

How do you feel about that? Any of you running Owncloud/forks on any LET servers? What do you guys use storage VPS from LET vendors for? Seedbox and Plex?

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Comments

  • I use my storage vps's for syncthing, backups and seedbox.

    I have 4 copies of important data. Syncthing copies them from my home to 3 different servers. Backups of servers are nothing I couldnt afford to lose, but even those are on two different servers. And seedbox is nothing id ever backup.

    Thanked by 1Layer
  • I would trust them based on the length of time that they have been established, reviews, and your general feeling from them. If they're well reviewed and appear to be growing (inside and outside of LET), then you should be okay.

  • Even if they are reputable providers, you should always have multiple copies of your important data. Hardware can and will break, so always a good idea to have backups of backups.

    Thanked by 1Radi
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    PepeSilvia said: How do you feel about that?

    Kind of empty inside.

    Maybe buying another LEB will help...

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited January 2017

    I'd think most people use high storage plans from LET providers for media servers. That's the only reason I setup one for myself to use (though I don't offer public storage plans.)

    Anything important surely wouldn't be stored on a very cheap storage box. Maybe two and mirror data? Probably wouldn't be cheaper in that case though. How much data do you store on s3?

  • sinsin Member

    I backup all my sites, databases, etc to several different providers/storage boxes. I wouldn't fully trust any single provider with my data as it's not a very good idea to have all your backups stored in a single place.

  • If it's really important have it in multiple places. If it's only semi-important I've felt ok having it on RAID in a single location. I do have more reservations about buying storage from new or shaky providers than I would about smaller VPS.

    I've found it preferable to buy longer term plans, like quarterly or annual rather than monthly, because of too many experiences messing up with payments at my end (Paypal suckage and that sort of thing). It's scary to have an invoice for TB's of storage due in a few days when your bank has screwed up your credit card etc. Paying further in advance gives you more time to deal with such things as they come up. Bitcoin is another possibility but I haven't used it yet.

  • I don't. I use a Kimsufi for this. 2TB at $8.. Why I would I bother with a storage VPS?

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider
    edited January 2017

    PepeSilvia said: Even if they go out of business, you know they're very likely to let you download it all first.

    I really doubt that. This is more of a branding thing (no doubt helped by said companies' constant marketing of their supposed 'trustworthiness') than a realistic expectation. Things fall over all the time, and almost every company just vanishes within at most a month, often much less than that.

    It's generally the tiny personally-run services that make a real effort to keep people's data available to them (eg. by announcing impending financial issues well before they happen).

    PepeSilvia said: but I can't trust them with data I cannot afford to lose.

    You can't trust anyone with that, and the company size doesn't play a role there. This is why things like the 3-2-1 rule exist (3 backups, on 2 different media locally, and at least 1 off-site).

  • While businesses can go out of service at any time like you said, the two best metrics you can monitor is length of service from the business, and cross this with the pricing per month. If monthly costs have remained stable in the length of the business (and not dramatically increased or reduced [I'm not talking about special offers here!]) then that will give you some kind of feeling for how stable the business is operating.

    Finally, the length of the business running will also give you the confidence that any long-running business will likely give warning of dissolution, before switching the lights off.

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • mfsmfs Banned, Member
    edited January 2017

    I don't trust "cloud" as a definitive solution for backups; I have local backups of everything I need. I'm quite wary of "cloud" solutions, and exceptionally wary of amazon/dropbox/google/microsoft.
    Don't get caught in the so-called "data-gravity" these "cloud" providers tend to gain over the years (amazon above all). Someone else' computer should ideally, in my view, be seen as a commodity for the always-on and always-connected factor (your "cloud" data is distributed and at your fingertips even if you're not at home/at work and on all your devices) but you shouldn't be totally dependant on it for your data.

    Syncthing has been mentioned and it works pretty well. I'd like to mention skylable sx; it's not very famous, yet it provides client-side encrypted, redundant and deduplicated storage across multiple boxes in a pretty easy to deploy way; there are clients for any platform too. They have also a drop-in replacement for S3.

    If you can't afford to lose your data, always keep your own backups anyway.

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited January 2017

    Personally out of every provider here, I would only trust Fransico as I have actually seen pictures of the racks he colocated and which he shared here. In the other hand providers that lease have easier time pulling out if they so wish.

    But thats only for long term stuff I want peace of mind with. I dont mind hosting my TS3, gameservers or website with the cheapest (but most competent) provider out there.

    Before anything, I'd rather buy local NAS and set it up on RAID1 with 2 HDD's. Only then I can be sure.

  • The old gods are reliable gods.

    Buyvm, prometeus, and now time4vps(their parent company at least) .

    They've been around long enough.

  • Most of my current storage is on a Hetzner dedi (3t.b raid-1) and before that it was on OVH dedis and before that at BuyVM. I also have some overspill on Time4VPS and i83 storage vps's (both of them seem good) but my general idea is to consolidate it on a dedi again sooner or later, by upgrading my current Hetzner to one with more disk, or by adding a second one.

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • WebProjectWebProject Host Rep, Veteran

    In my opinion the Dropbox lost the trust as they were hacked in past:
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/31/dropbox-hack-passwords-68m-data-breach

  • If It's data I cannot afford to lose I would always use a much more trusted vendor such as Azure/Amazon/Dropbox etc.

    But either way I wouldn't trust a startup with or a smaller web host with a larger operation and sensitive information.

  • Find providers with a positive review history, including stories of incidents they had. Did they respond well to failures in the past? Have a regular backup in at least another location, and a template/deployment script to install whatever file server application needed to get a new server up quickly if one goes down or provider goes out of business.

  • souen said: Have a regular backup in at least another location, and a template/deployment script to install whatever file server application needed to get a new server up quickly if one goes down or provider goes out of business.

    We're talking about storage so the above is not always so easy. As someone on HN put it, data has mass. It's a big hassle shovelling TBs of data around even within the same DC. And keeping multiple copies gets expensive.

    If it's for backup purposes OVH Cloud storage might be a good choice: is about 1 cent per GB per month and triple replicated. The catch is it's another 1 cent per GB outbound bandwidth cost to get the data out again (inbound is free). They said almost a year ago that they plan to decrease the storage charge to 0.4 cents/GB but it hasn't happened yet. And even 1 cent per GB with free bw is fairly expensive by LET cheap storage standards.

    Online.net c14 is another cold storage service with similar strategy, no geo dispersion but data is split across a large number of drives, and storage is just 2 euro per TB per month. Getting the data out or deleting it is another 10 euro per TB.... https://www.online.net/en/c14

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • I dont.
    If the data worth cryig over loss, it will stay in 400km radius around me in multiple copies.

  • miau said:

    I dont. If the data worth cryig over loss, it will stay in 400km radius around me in multiple copies.

    I'd want the copies geographically dispersed...

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • @willie said:
    We're talking about storage so the above is not always so easy. As someone on HN put it, data has mass. It's a big hassle shovelling TBs of data around even within the same DC. And keeping multiple copies gets expensive.

    Yeah, transfer can be a hassle. For cost, it depends on setting and usage. For personal storage, some people don't need to move many TBs of data, if averaging a few TB storage in total and don't need to transfer it all at a time. Some people do backups at less frequent intervals for non-critical data to save costs. Maybe some things can be acquired again, some are irreplaceable and/or business model relies on it. The question is whether the data is important enough to make expenses worthwhile and how much risk people are willing to take.

  • You may want to check out Vultr. They have LEB prices and have storage VPSs and block storage options.... only out of certain data centers. The block storage is free up to a certain amount. I think this is a pretty trustworthy company.

  • AdamM said: Vultr. They have LEB prices and have storage VPSs and block storage options....

    Vultr block storage is $0.10/GB which is far outside of what I'd consider to be LEB pricing. It's nice if you want to stash away a bit of application data, but I'd think for "storage VPS" to mean anything, it has to start at maybe 200GB. I'm always tracking LET storage offers and what I'd consider low end storage is 0.01/GB or lower.

    As for moving TB's around quickly, well, that's what you have to do if one of your providers is about to go dark.

    Thanked by 1PepeSilvia
  • sinsin Member

    @willie said:

    AdamM said: Vultr. They have LEB prices and have storage VPSs and block storage options....

    Vultr block storage is $0.10/GB which is far outside of what I'd consider to be LEB pricing. It's nice if you want to stash away a bit of application data, but I'd think for "storage VPS" to mean anything, it has to start at maybe 200GB. I'm always tracking LET storage offers and what I'd consider low end storage is 0.01/GB or lower.

    As for moving TB's around quickly, well, that's what you have to do if one of your providers is about to go dark.

    VULTR has a 250GB Storage VPS for $10/month or $0.015/hour

  • sin said:

    VULTR has a 250GB Storage VPS for $10/month or $0.015/hour

    Oh yes I remember something about that now. But I can't find anything about it on vultr.com any more. Could it be discontinued? Did it have RAID? $40/TB is around 10x what some LET hosts charge anyway.

  • willie said: Online.net c14 is another cold storage service with similar strategy, no geo dispersion but data is split across a large number of drives, and storage is just 2 euro per TB per month. Getting the data out or deleting it is another 10 euro per TB.... https://www.online.net/en/c14

    c14 is interesting for long term storage but adding regular backups is expensive, due to operation fee.

  • @willie said:
    We're talking about storage so the above is not always so easy. As someone on HN put it, data has mass. It's a big hassle shovelling TBs of data around even within the same DC. And keeping multiple copies gets expensive.

    Tell that to all the people who think that "Big Data" is something everyone can do now just because they can pick up a few TBs for $100. If the data is too expensive it keep, a properly run business would simply delete it, and maybe question why they're collecting it all in the first place.

    I'd want the copies geographically dispersed...

    This is another "common wisdom" sort of thing that really doesn't make sense. Yes, it's easier than ever to spread your data all over the world. But to what end? If there is some disaster that takes out every copy in your city, odds are pretty good that you'll have bigger issues to deal with than getting a web site back up.

    It's a different story for larger corporations that are inherently at multiple locations already. But's a dumb practice to do everything like a large corporation does things. We are not Apple. Best practices for us will differ.

  • user123user123 Member
    edited January 2017

    If there is some disaster that takes out every copy in your city, odds are pretty good that you'll have bigger issues to deal with than getting a web site back up.

    That's true. The challenge of finding something to fap to is not one that should be taken lightly.

  • williewillie Member
    edited January 2017

    impossiblystupid said: If there is some disaster that takes out every copy in your city, odds are pretty good that you'll have bigger issues to deal with than getting a web site back up.

    This was a significant issue after the 9/11 attack shut all the data centers in lower Manhattan. It wasn't about a web site, it was about massive amounts of Wall St financial data. People using geographically distributed databases recovered much better than the rest.

    As another example, iirc there have been issues with southeastern DC's being taken out by hurricanes hitting the east coast. I don't know of actual data loss from those incidents (i.e. the hard disks were still there when the DC's came back up, unlike in Manhattan) but if you want to avoid a long downtime you better have copies elsewhere.

  • @willie said:
    This was a significant issue after the 9/11 attack shut all the data centers in lower Manhattan. It wasn't about a web site, it was about massive amounts of Wall St financial data. People using geographically distributed databases recovered much better than the rest.

    You are not Wall Street.

    As another example, iirc there have been issues with southeastern DC's being taken out by hurricanes hitting the east coast. I don't know of actual data loss from those incidents (i.e. the hard disks were still there when the DC's came back up, unlike in Manhattan) but if you want to avoid a long downtime you better have copies elsewhere.

    I think you're conflating two different issues. There is a big difference between having a backup/storage somewhere and running a redundant server. Simply having reliable copies of data does not necessarily mean you're going to avoid major downtime. Hell, you might not even be able to connect to the Internet, never mind having the resources to do a recovery from backups (at any location).

    Disaster planning isn't something you can just hand wave. If you really need it, you need to be prepared to pay for it. If you don't, you really shouldn't pretend that any of the half-way steps you take are going to be worth squat when something really catastrophic happens to your whole city. People just need to be realistic if they want to weather a major disaster.

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