Hi Everybody!

As some of you have possibly gathered I have got into starting my own business recently and was interested to see what services I can/should be offering.
I did a couple of searches and browsed through the old archives of sites like these and saw that Off-Site backups boomed at one stage. It seems like a relatively straight-forward thing, so whats the catch?

I can see myself offering a service whereby I set up an internet connection and a box to automatically back-up information off a server and database on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. I can also understand the risk involved on the clients side, as they would be allowing you access to sensitive and personal data.

Now what I want to know, is whether there is a market for this kind of thing and what prices you could be looking at...any other advice or tips would also be gratefully appreciated.

BTW : Dont come and post here saying xxxx.com offers offsite backups and they are great. I really couldn't be less interested. If you are in some sort of affiliate program, take the posts elsewhere please! Thanks

~Equinox

Well you should consider the demand in the industry for dedicated servers, gaming servers, web hosting, and such... Although the industry is currently almost at a saturation state considering the amount of businesses going up each day, you would have to have something that stands out in order for customers to pay attention to you...

Hehehe... funny you should say that Equinox!

Yeah I would actually be interested in knowing what kind of market there is for offsite backup as well. We get few requests for it. Most of our customers are content with local backups to a second drive.

ldcdc : I apologised for that already...guess I'm not off the hook yet eh?

I just found it funny, but maybe I was a bit out of line. I apologise for that.

ldcdc, no problem...its more my fault than your fault anyways *wink*

Well as a web host, we do provide off-site backups on a weekly basis. I am not trying to promote my company by saying this, rather explain why we have such measures in place which will give you an idea of making a good point for the need of this service to potential clients.

Don't know how many of you heard about a fire which broke out in the UK in an underground tunnel carrying BT's optical cables. The whole city of Manchester had severe problems with Internet connectivity and website availability, including strategic government/commerce/banking systems being offline.

This example well illustrates the need to have a backup copy of the servers at an off-site (and off-city) location together with backup servers to divert the traffic to until connectivity gets restored.

Therefore mission critical business operation departments I'd say are your primary target. Web hosting companies could get interested in this.

Off-site storage is certainly a good market to be in. Disaster recovery is usually not a very hot item for people. Nobody really likes to think about disaster and 'it will always happen to others and yourself'. With a good marketing strategy and a good product you should be well on your way.

Christoph

Sounds like insurance...maybe I should chat to my broker...he'll know all about it....thanks for the replies guys...

Off site backups are something everyone should think of. Of course nobody likes to think about bad stuff but it is better than kicking your own ass after something happens. Better to ACT than REACT. Notice most things are REACTIONS after it blows up.

Can you afford to lose all your day right here right now? I dont think anyone could.

Off-site is the only way to do backups, in my opinion.

Backup process:
Encrypt - Archive - Storage (seperate DC).

Simon

While onsite backups may suffice, there really is no downside to offsite other than the cost. You have understand that you already have access to all of your clients data whether its backed up or not, assuming you have shell access...

There are no negatives to offsite backups. I have a dedicated T1 here in my office just for offsite monthly backups of all of our servers. We keep onsite backups at the DC in addition for quick client restores. Building a server with a 3ware raid card and 8 200GB SATA drives is not very expensive and is a good solution. I started doing this about a year ago when someone at EV1 formatted not one but two drives in one of our old servers. Needless to say I had an offisite backup server the next week and we were no longer using EV1 for anything.

Offsite backups are more work, but they're an excellent security measure. 99.9% of the time, you won't need them...but that one time you DO need the offsite backups, you and your client base will be extremely happy that you have them.