Dear Applz thanks for your question, 250gb of data isn’t a lot of data these days, most severs you buy come with a minimum of 500gb unless you specifically ask for less. The way I see it is your data is by sure a very important aspect to your business and your post clearly indicates that without having access to your data you most certainly can’t operator your business. For this reason alone you should never consider shared hosting for your data as its mission critical to the operation of your business.
The two other choices you have are a dedicated physical server which you don’t own and you lease off someone each month, this attracts a higher monthly cost and or Co-Location where you have initial capital expense in buying a server and just pay a much small co-location fee per month. The difference is co-location your data is stored on your own hardware, and a leased dedicated server your data is in the hands of someone else’s hardware. A typical 1RU enterprise dell server for your requirements wouldn’t cost much more than $2k outright.
Both services can be provided as an unmanaged and or managed service which takes the responsibility and requirement to have IT staff as you can outsource the required maintenance, almost every host could offer you the required management.
Reliability of your data is the easy part, you can run mirrored raid 1 hard drives which keeps two copys of your data on two separate harddrives in the same sever and or you could run dual servers with raid 1 drives in two physical locations for ultimate reliability. The reliability of the service also comes down to the quality of the parts which make up your server.
Also don’t forget the disaster recovery side of things of having the ability to also backup your data and check consistency regularly, again most provides should be able to provide this service.
Our Micron21 Melbourne Datacentre DR service allows you to have hardware in two datacentres geographically separated with dedicated bandwidth between each server insuring you have true redundancy at a physical layer. To read more about our Micron21 DR service please
read here.
From a insurance point of view you can get data insured on a single server, we do this for some of our clients although the minimum term is 12 months on any insurance policy. Insurance companies will only insure data which is on hardware owed by your business, not a 3rd party.
Hope that helps explain some of your questions
Kindest Regards
James
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