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Are my email and web files backed up?

Our servers operate with a number of redundant systems, including RAID mirroring and regular backups. In addition, our data center has highly redundant power, data, and environmental systems that minimize the chance of downtime.

However, in the unlikely case of data loss, we cannot guarantee that your files are backed up as of a specific moment. Due to the constant data changes that result with hosting services, it's simply impossible to provide up-to-the-second backups of all information on all servers. Configuration information is backed up regularly.

For this reason, we recommend that all of our hosting customers do not use our servers as the sole place where their information exists. We recommend that hosting users keep their email synced to local computers and also make sure that websites and all associated materials are backed up as well.

Do you retain copies of my/our company emails even after they are deleted by a mail program?

We have backups of email for the purposes of recovery from a major hardware failure. However, due to the nature of the large amount of data which our email servers handle, we do not archive this information, so email is not available for recovery beyond a 24-hour period.

If you are looking for email archival and retention services, we can provide this service in the form of regular offsite snapshots of your email accounts, as part of our Offsite Backup service. However, even this service isn't foolproof, as email can be received and deleted by a user within minutes, so it may not ever show on a nightly backup. If you need fool-proof or regulatory-compliant email archival services, we can help set up a complete solution like Google's Postini. Contact us for more information on either of these services.

Can I just keep all of my email on your server?

Our server has no limits to the size of the mailbox or how long you can keep messages on the server, but we recommend that POP users remove message older than 30 days from the server. Performance of your mailbox may slow down once you have more than a few thousand messages in a single mailbox, and 30 days worth of email is usually a reasonable amount of storage without any impact on performance.

We recommend that IMAP users limit the number of emails in a single mailbox to under 1000 for best performance.

Also, we cannot guarantee that all of your email is backed up at any given moment, so we do not recommend using our server as the only place where you store all of your email.

Related Topics include: Hosting Frequently Asked Questions, TSP Email and Web Hosting, Spam Filtering.