Let us sing the praises of Linode, a provider of cloud-hosting for Linux-based applications and web sites. At work we’ve had two of these for a year, and they just work, exactly if the servers were sitting in the next room, except that they provide a slick management interface, and you can mix and match among different disk sizes, RAM, processors, redundancy, and various flavors of Linux. Access is via their web site, or via a secure terminal session.

Here’s a shot of the backup screen, (click to enlarge).

 The Linode-provided backup is great for basic backup. It makes backups on a weekly and daily basis. It also has a provision for a snapshot, which is a great way to back up the server before doing upgrades. Full details are on their web site, including the costs, which are a few dollars per month depending on the size of the Linode.

There are some limitations…for example with MySQL database transactions. Linode recommends that you perform a data dump of your MySQL data so that the dump files get backed up.