We (as a company) were hosting one of our websites on a ramhost node in Germany (vz60 to be more precise)
never had any problems with it in the past year or so, but today was that Murphy's law day when we emailed one of our partners and linked to a file on the site in some important mail exchange, and we were waiting for his reply. Then we received an alert from our monitoring system that the website is down. We said ok, it will be back in a few minutes. A few hours passed and the machine was still offline. We checked Ramhost's status page and that node was the only one offline. One hour ago or so Ramhost published an announcement that the node's hard-drives were seized by the German authorities.
Notice available here: http://paste.ee/r/KCzXn
Well, ok - we said. We have backups, no worries. We are reasonable customers and don't just host things since yesterday, but what really catched my attention was the following phrase:
"Unfortunately, any backups we had of this server were also stored on drives mounted in this server - those
were seized by the German Police along with the primary hard drives."
And THAT'S the thing to worry about! Whoever provides hosting services along with backups should not host the backups on the same machine. Call it common sense rule/good practice or however you want.
Sure - some hosting companies can simply say in the TOS/service agreement/description that they do not provide backups.
But anyway, if you are a hosting company and you store your backups on the same machine, you're doing it wrong. It's kind of better if you don't do it at all - ironically but it sounds better.
I take this opportunity given the unfavorable circumstances to raise some awareness for both hosting providers and customers: "No backups" is better than "stupid backups" - and it would be interesting for the community to know how other providers are doing the backups.