What are your Backups, Redundancies, SLA, Security, and Disaster Recovery Plans?
1. What is the uptime SLA of the environment?
The Brownrice SLA is 99.99%. View our full Terms of Service here:
https://brownrice.com/pop_tos
2. What backups does Brownrice provide?
There are three tiers of backups with our (Gen7) VPS platform:
Snapshots: You can take a snapshot backup of your entire VPS, these can be locked/saved, and restored all via the dashboard. This is useful for being able to quickly revert the VPS to a known-good snapshot if something breaks during an upgrade procedure, etc. Three snapshots are included with your Gen7 VPS for free, these snapshots are automatically generated for the 1st of the month, every friday (last friday), and nightly (last night). These snapshots are stored on the same host machine as the VPS, so they aren't to be relied upon in the case of a host machine failure.
On-site full backups: These are full backups of all website configs, files, and databases for all sites on a VPS. These are stored on-site, on a separate server from the VPS, and we can use them anytime to restore a singe missing file, a single site, a database, or the entire VPS. These are on-site and can be used to quickly restore a VPS in the case of a host machine failure. Nightly backups are stored for 8 nights and again on the 1st of the month. Monthly backups are stored for three months. This means that at any point we can restore your site (or entire VPS) back as far as 3 months.
Remote full backups: These are full backups of all website configs, files, and databases for all sites on a VPS. These are stored at our remote datacenter and can be used to restore a site (or full VPS) in the case of a disaster. This is part of our disaster recovery plan, in case of a natural disaster or fire in our datacenter, etc. the data is stored remotely and can still be restored even if our datacenter is offline.
3. What is the disaster recovery plan?
We utilize a second remote data center for remote backups and remote monitoring. In the case of catastrophic situation we would restore all data to this second data center and resume services ASAP.
4. If we decide to end or not renew the contract what happens to our data?
We wipe out the data on your drives and after three months your backup data is rotated out and removed from our backup servers. On top of that the drives themselves are phsyically destroyed, we don't re-use drives.
5. Who has access to our data?
Only Brownrice systems administrators can access your data, and the data will only be accessed upon your approval in order to fix service issues.
6. How is our data, including back up data segmented and protected?
Backup data is stored on segmented, private networks and are stored on physical servers both locally and in our remote data center.
7. What are your network redundancies in your datacenter?
Brownrice has triple network redundancy. We have 2 pysically redundant fiber routes (northern and southern routes) with automated failover. These leave the building and go separate directions, and do not share the same conduit. We also have a 3rd redundant wireless route in the unlikely case that something happens to both of those routes at the same time..
8. What are your power redundancies in your datacenter?
In addition to our APC batteries, which all hosting equipment is on, we have a massive 100,000 watt Diesel Generator that can run indefinitely to keep our systems online. The APC batteries assist in smoothing out the power and facilitating a seamless switch-over to generator.
9. What are your HVAC (cooling) redundancies in your datacenter?
We have triple redundant A/C systems to keep the datacenter cool at all times. By utilizing hot-aisle containment and ambient air cooling our data center is engineered to capitilize on the dry, predominantly cool outside air that we have at our 7,000' location. As a result we are able to cool our servers solely with filtered, outside air for nine months of the year.
10. What security is included with Brownrice hosting?
VPS security: Our latest VPS template is on the latest Alma9 OS release (EOL in 2032), including a firewall with only the ports open required by running services to operate. It also uses Fail2Ban WAF (web application firewall) that will auto-block IPs based off common attacks (brute force logins and other known attacks). All running services are configured properly with default configs removed. Only services required for web hosting are running on the VPS, with unnecesarry services purged from the template. All services running on the VPS have been hardened to industry standards with default configs and users removed, and the VPS is PCI compliant ready out of the box.
Data Center Security: Our data center is both PCI and HIPAA compliant utilizing biometric entry, IP and physical based security systems, logs for entry/exit, and our staff is a highly trained group of engineers who have been repeatedly battle tested. Security is what we do. Every day.
11. What failover is included with my Brownrice hosting?
Our default VPS plan doesn't include failover, but does include 99.9% uptime. The hardware that your VPS is hosted on consists of Enterprise level equipment that has redundant power supplies, RAID 10 SSD disk arrays, and are not prone to unexpected failure. And in the case of host machine failure we have on-site backups and we'll get things back up ASAP by restoring data over our LAN to ensure minimal downtime in such a case.
Tags: a/c, air conditioning, backup, backups, cooling, disaster, failover, generator, hvac, network, power, recovery, redundancies, security, service level agreement, sla, snapshot, snapshots, solar