Anyone who promises 100% uptime is lying. One second of downtime in a year makes that claim false, and every hosting provider, from the smallest VPS hosting company to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, has had outages. Fiber cuts happen thousands of times a year in the US alone. Storms knock out power. Human error takes down services (AWS S3, Azure, and Google have all had major incidents caused by a single bad config change). Data centers can be affected by fire, flood, or cooling failures.
The question isn’t whether your server will experience downtime. It’s when, and whether you’re ready for it.
Backups are the minimum
If you’re not backing up your VPS, you’re gambling with your data. We offer automated backup plans with daily snapshots and up to 30 days of retention. Sign up for one. But don’t stop there: if your application uses a database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server), run database-level backups on a schedule as well. A VPS snapshot catches the disk state, but a database dump gives you a clean, consistent copy of your data.
Keep your own off-site copies too. Download backups to your local machine or a third-party service like Backblaze B2. The goal is to have your data in at least two places that aren’t the same physical location.
Multi-region and failover
If downtime directly costs your business money, consider running your application across multiple data centers. We have six locations: Las Vegas, Dallas, Ashburn, Santa Clara, Amsterdam, and Singapore. You can deploy virtual servers at two or more of these and use DNS failover or a load balancer to route traffic to the healthy one if the primary goes down.
This doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple setup is: primary VPS in one region, standby VPS in another, database replication between them, and a health check that switches DNS if the primary stops responding.
Test your recovery process
Having backups is only useful if you’ve tested restoring from them. At least once a quarter, practice a recovery: spin up a new VPS, restore from backup, and verify that everything works. You don’t want to discover that your backups are corrupted or incomplete when you actually need them.
What we do on our end
Our infrastructure is built for resilience. VPS hosting disks are stored on Ceph, which replicates data across many SSDs. Hypervisors have redundant power feeds. Our network is multi-carrier with automatic failover. But even with all of that, we can’t guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. No provider can. The best we can do is minimize the probability and help you plan for the rest.
If you want help designing a setup that can survive outages, contact our team. We’ve helped customers build multi-region deployments using both VPS hosting and dedicated servers.