This website has been down for a few weeks since my old web host lost my virtual machine in a RAID disaster. If my business depended on this website I would have spent more time and money on my backup strategy. And although this is not a business critical site, it is still one close to my heart and the pain and time taken to get this site back up has been more than I anticipated.

This site was hosted on a cheap VM with UK Webhosting. I was not paying for the optional extra of backups. But I was regularly backing up the database and saving it on the server. I made the assumption (NEVER MAKE ASSUMPTIONS) that as I was not paying for backups I was responsible for data loss relating to app errors, but that they would not lose my virtual machine hard disk.

When my server went down I was first told they had a network issue that would be resolved. A day later they told me that they'd had an issue with their RAID drive and all the data had been lost and that they did not have any backups. They then sent me several irritating emails talking about the importance of backing up your data. I've moved all my sites to Amazon AWS now. I've lost faith in UK Webhosting to be able to keep my data safe and in how long it took them to let me know there was an issue.

The last time I took an offsite backup of the database for this site was several years ago, so I now need to get my lost data back from the wayback machine. I still believe that your backup strategy should match the business criticalness of your site. But this has reminded me of the importance of offsite backups and never making any assumptions. It doesn't really matter if this site goes down for a few hours, or even days, but I don't want to lose data ever again if a hard drive in the cloud blows up.