Geographically Distributed Backups for Enhanced Data Protection

We are excited to announce that as of this month we have deployed a system for geographically distributed backups, which minimizes the risk of data loss and аllows for fast data recovery even in case of a serious incident that may affect a whole data center. 

Backups are stored in a different physical datacenter from the one hosting the live account

As of this month we started backing up accounts in a datacenter different from the one hosting the live account as follows: 

• Iowa, US servers are backed up on machines in Virginia, US
• London, UK servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL
• Frankfurt, DE servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL
• Eemshaven, NL servers are backed up in Frankfurt, DE 
• Sydney, AU servers are backed up in Singapore, SG

This service is not available for accounts hosted in Singapore for now. These accounts are backed up on different servers within the Singapore facility.

Enhanced data protection

Data storage and safety is a key component of our service and there are multiple risk factors and threats that we keep in mind when coming up with data security solutions. The most common ones are human errors, hardware failure, and hacks. For those occasions, we rely on our daily backups stored on different servers independently from the live account. But then, there are the less likely, yet more damaging risks such as fire, power outage, or a natural disaster that may shut down a whole data center facility. Hosting the backups in a different location means we improve the chances for saving your data and putting it back online even in case of such a serious incident.

Faster service restore

Now imagine your website goes offline due to a massive power outage and the ETA is unknown, which most often means hours of downtime. Or, a hurricane completely destroyed the facility and all servers are lost beyond recovery. That was a very real threat we experienced with Katrina hurricane back in 2005 and is a growing risk in some areas given the climate change and the growing number of natural disasters all over the world. Or, maybe a fire burns the datacenter and a lot, if not all, servers are hurt. That one happened quite recently to a third-party data center in France.

Thanks to our new system, we now have you covered since we have your data safely backed up not more than 24 hours ago in a different data center. In case of an incident we would be able to put your website back online in the new location that is fully operational.

Thus the distributed backups not only save your data, but allow us to restore service in the new DC much faster than any optimistic ETA would forecast for restoring in the original DC.

The distributed backup strategy has been something we have considered for a long time. However, it became practically possible once we started to use the Google Cloud infrastructure. The use of one and the same provider for all our geographical locations, with a super fast interrelatedness between its different data centers and a wide network of facilities around the world, allowed us to distribute data across regions, countries and continents in a way that was not possible before.

We have to recognize the fact that before switching to Google Cloud infrastructure that strategy for distributed backups was not possible in such a sophisticated way. Google Cloud has given us easy access to all their worldwide facilities, including networking capacity and that generated various new possibilities to distribute data across regions, countries and continents.

Same level of data privacy

Our Privacy Policy and DPA continue to apply in light of our new geographically distributed backups. Our clients’ data will be protected in the same way as before, as promised, and under our DPA.

While we are hopeful that no natural forces will affect any data centers, our team prefers to be prepared for the worst and provide our clients with reassurance for their websites.