What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery (DR) is a set of policies, tools, and procedures designed to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems after a natural or human-caused disaster. In web hosting, it ensures your website and data can be restored after a catastrophic failure.
How Does Disaster Recovery Work?
A disaster recovery plan defines Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable downtime, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable data loss period. For example, an RTO of 1 hour means your site must be back online within an hour, and an RPO of 15 minutes means you can lose at most 15 minutes of data.
Effective disaster recovery for web hosting involves regular automated backups stored in multiple geographic locations, documented procedures for restoring services, failover systems that can take over when primary systems fail, and regular testing of the recovery process. Cloud hosting makes disaster recovery more accessible by enabling quick deployment of infrastructure in new regions if the primary region becomes unavailable.