As part of what makes it worth buying from a reseller instead of directly from a hosting company, would it be worth offering daily back ups as a part of the service? Or even as an optional extra that you add a small fee for on the monthly bill?

Many of the bigger companies do take regular, sometimes even daily backups. The first issue with the viability of this would be how easy it is to do the backups as a reseller without taking a huge tow on your data transfer usage. The second is the value, as seen by the end users. If they use databases, regular backups become more important, and with the right wording, you can convince them that this is a huge benefit.

Another thing that could differentiate your offer from most others, would be actual direct access of the customer, to the backups that have been made. Make sure you don't make it seem like you guarantee availability of data. Backups or no backups, there's always a very unfortunate scenario where data could go missing.

Excellent point, if you are selling the service then you need to be sure that it can be provided and sometimes backups aren't as complete as you would hope.

Then there is the issue of providing instant access to a back up, especially if your hosting is down. Food for thought, thank you.

May want to check with hosts that use r1soft backup service. nCDP is a very popular backup solution and can be 100% accessed by the client even if their site/server is offline (as the backup solution is being stored on a separate server). We utilize this on our regular shared hosting solutions, but so many resellers want the VPS option, and nCDP doesn't work on a VPS From that angle, Paralells has a backup solution for VPS machines.

Backups are important and should be available to customers. If nothing else, using one of the online backup services like MOSY or something could be a solution.

Have you ever lost data that was important and time consuming to re-create? It is a benefit, but some hosts do not feel they need to take care of this, rather the client does unless its something that goes into the area of extra services to sell. Many do not want to take the time doing such a thing.

Almost all the hosting company's have their own backup policies, which can be daily / weekly/ monthly backups, most common would be the weekly backups. But it is advisable to take up daily backups for the domains, and keep downloading the backups regularly onto your PC as well.

Weekly backups are most commonly used.
However as Sari mentioned it is highly recommended to make your own daily backups just in case. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

Never trust a web hosting company backup, its your responsibility to keep your own backup. A web host may have a back up, but what happens if they don't have your backup?

Thats why its smart to run your own backup even if it will take 5 Minute of your life to generate and download.

Sometimes the customer is a few days late to discover the problem and daily backups are overwritten with the corrupted data. That's why we prefer taking daily and weekly backups at the same time. Customer's responsibility in taking own backups is now accepted as an industry standard but it's always better to keep the customer happy anyways.

We run backups every 4 hours for our customers (files AND databases). These backups only backup CHANGED files, and 8 instances of the files exist. So there's always a farily older copy of the file available for users to restore.

nCDP is really the way to go. We still advise our users to make their own backups, but having them on hand here on our side is quicker and easier for customers.

We do backups daily. And we also backup our backups daily to a remote location on the other end of our network in a data vault. So doing this to the remote location is done quickly because it is on our main fiber network and the transfer speeds and data transfer doesn't require us to us internet bandwidth only the fiber connection data transfer is used. This does two things one it gives us a fail safe backup in case our facility is wiped off the face of the earth. Also we only backup the data changes rather than the entire data daily. We backup all customer data and the SQL and cpanel/plesk account data. The only down side is capacity of the backup in other words a customer goes MIA and our backups are logged for 3 days. Then they show up 7 days later having had problems for 3-4 days. The backup we have might only be the backup of the error, etc.

We perform daily /weekly / monthly backups for all our accounts and including our resellers and their sub accounts. - we have our own Private network with gig-E connection to private racks with all our servers. - We offer the back up solution to dedicated hosting customer servers as well -

we know lots of web hosting companies that do not back up.

it is important that customers back up their data and website themselves as well - but in reality i think a good host will do an excellent job

It would seem that a traditional backup solution as we know it is changing its meaning.

A regularly scheduled backup is a great thing to offer. However, there are more and more companies that go toward RAID solutions, data mirrowing and cloud computing - which makes your website data dynamic. So it makes me wonder whether a company that offers shared web hosting on cloud architecture should worry about daily backups since its so hard to lose data, if it is shared between X number of servers...

Or am I missing the point?

Data shared among devices such as in RAID does make the potential for data loss minimal, and with balancing over multiple servers this becomes even less. The idea of backups (as you said) is changing however. More and more, it's not so much that the hard drive crashed and the data is gone, it's a situation of my site was defaced, or hacked or I accidently deleted a file. In a RAID environment this doesn't help the use. Having incrimental backups allows a user to go back in time on their site and retrieve files that they may have deleted or become corrupt (even database's or database tables).

One other item on the backup is that if the hosting company goes out of business, or the data center is hit with a disaster (fire, flood, hurricane) - do you have the ability to restore your site? Most people do not. In having an OFFSITE backup, you're a little safer. Having YOUR OWN backup is even better because then you can restore at a new host if needed.

I've seen hosting companies fold up overnight. It's sad, but they close everything and leave their users stranded. Featureprice (2004 or 2005 I think) closed their doors with over 100,000 sites. Phone disconnected, everything shut down. I can't tell you how many users came to us with no backups

I agree that it sounds like an ideal way for anyone to store/retrieve data, but what is (if it exists) the closest possible solution that might address this problem?