Hosting Service Manual

Overview

The data for Production environments is backed up on a daily basis (see Disaster Recovery for enhanced options). Backups from other environments are made twice a week. Backups are encrypted and stored locally in the cloud provider's native object store (such as AWS S3).

Data backed up and archived by our own backup jobs includes, but is not limited to, the databases, file repositories, configuration data, SSL certificates and other files or data required to rebuild the environment from scratch in the case of a disaster.

All backups are retained for a maximum of 30 days.

Backup Window

Scheduled window for backups is between midnight and 6am. In some cases database backups may be scheduled in advance of the normal backup window, between 6pm and midnight.

Environments not running are temporarily switched on during their backup window in order for the backup to complete. This means that, regardless of the power schedule of an environment, a backup is still taken daily.

Impact & Monitoring

We aim to keep the impact of backup jobs to a minimum, however due to the nature of large file transfers and other operations some impact on end user response times is to be expected during the backup window. We do not expect any down time or impact on functionality whilst backups are taken.

The status of backup jobs are monitored, and failures are investigated during working days as part of a daily checklist. We may re-run backup jobs during the day time if the impact is deemed to be minimal.

Production Environments

In addition to the above, backups for Production environments are also replicated to another cloud provider as an offsite replica. For servers, part of Production environments' native cloud provider full disk snapshots (for example AWS EBS snapshots) are taken as well.

Other

In addition to our normal backups as described above, web server access logs are stored locally for 90 days.

Restores

Disaster Recovery

In the unlikely event of a disaster where a Production environment is unavailable, backups will be used recover the environment at a secondary cloud provider.

For more information see Disaster Recovery.

Environment Restore

GOSS can restore the data from an environment back to the same environment, or other environments in the same sequence (for example restore Production backup to the Development environment). During a restore all the data is restored, however some configuration may be different from the source environment:

• IP restriction configuration will be backed up and restored from the original environment data. This ensures that sites that should be restricted are still restricted after a restore has taken place
• Subsite URLs and Aliases will be backed up and restored from the original environment data. This ensures that sites can still be accessed under their original URLs after a restore has taken place
• SSL certificates will not be restored from the original environment

A restore requires downtime - while a restore takes place to an environment it will be inaccessible. 

The process for this type of restore is automated but a checklist is followed afterwards to ensure everything completed successfully.

Individual Files

File level restores can be completed by GOSS when needed, for example restoring individual media items may be possible without restoring all of the environment data. The process for this bespoke and will be considered per request.