Disaster recovery plan for small sites
 

I'm building out a site for an emmerging company with a small set of initial offerings. As we move into the second quarter of 2005, I anticipate large volumes of transactions in vBulletin, a standard store, a private/public CMS and one or two other platforms. We are also considering setting up some sort of trade solution, details as yet undecided.

At the moment, I'm totally alone on the technology side, but I have a background in IT and some knowlege about disaster recovery best practices (based on what I've seen, plus I'm reading through NIST docs). What I do not know is what is actually appropriate for smaller sites and startups who rely on less robust hosting as opposed to a full-fledged datacenter.

Are there best practices written anywhere for something this small? One thing that occured to me would be simply to set up hosting at another company in another part of the country, yet with the way hosting plans work I'm not certain we could guarantee a smooth failover within less than a couple of days.

I'd like to approach this as carefully and systematically as I can, while also not shocking the exec team with a huge pricetag etc. at this early juncture.

you could just host it local and perform daily, backups, and mirror the site to another server location, ie your house or anywhere.. I wouldnt sweat it... yet.

The best thing is to find a host that will manage a regular backup scheme for you - It will cost alot more than regular hosting but it will be worth it...

A few things you may want to investigate is how they backup - If they backup to the server your site is already on, there is no point ;)

Ideally the way they back up your data is by mirroring your site(s) at a particular point in the day to at least 2 seperate servers ;)

Chris

Can you make a recommendation? I have a feeling Dreamhost isn't quite up to this level yet. Based on my observations during the recent L.A. power outage, their one datacenter has a few single-points of failure.

There is only one company I have heard of but am unsure of their name - My dad's company uses them but they are unfortunately of the higher-end payment plans...

The best place to ask for this sort of info would be WHT :)

Chris

Gotcha. Thanks for the input! Still on the look out for annecdotal info, if anyone has it. I understand this is kind of out of scope for these forums, but I'm sure it's a useful discussion to see anyway.