Now, for those who aren’t in the “know” the best place to have your backups is “offsite” (or not on the same server or in the same physical location as your original data). This means that after the backup files are created, they need to be pushed somewhere else. BackWPup offers you the ability to FTP said files, but if you don’t have another server…this doesn’t help you much. What BackWPup offers, that is a fantastic feature, is the ability to push to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The basic idea is: “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.” Most importantly, it is cheap! It is only 15 cents per Gigabyte/Month.

For those who might not know how much space they need, let me give you an example of what I’m using here at Snowulf. We have (as of writing) 800+ posts, 500+ comments, 23 downloaded plugins, 105 MB of media (pictures) and 15 downloaded themes. I have BackWPup scheduled for two different backups: Everyday it backs up the database (posts, comments, categories, tags) and once a week it backups all the files (WordPress, plugins, themes, and media). The daily backup (compressed) is 1.5 MB and the weekly backup is 120 MB. If I keep every single backup for an entire month, I’ll be using a bit over 500 MB. That will cost me approximately 8 cents to keep around. Even if the blog literally DOUBLED in space usage each month, after 6 months, I’m still only paying about $2.50 a month for backup.

For peace of mind, knowing that no matter what happens tomorrow, I will be able to recover my blog with very little (if any) lost data, that is a very small price to pay. Of course, If something were to happen (ex: spammers sneaking in), I could roll back several days of backups – and I’m still good to go. If you want to get on the bandwagon, sign up for Amazon Web Services (you only pay for what you use, otherwise there is no cost to you). After that, download & install S3Fox (You are using Firefox, right?). If you need help getting started with S3Fox, checkout this wonderful tutorial video.

It was always a small bit of amusement to me that AWS was centered on the east coast with the US-East zone in North Virgina, when Amazon.com itself is based in Seattle. After US-East was the EU-West zone in Ireland, which made sense since it is a major popular hub (for Europe) and it gives great geographic diversity. Finally, though, we have US-West here in good old Northern California, or more specifically in the Bay Area.

The first thing I did was warm up an EC2 instance (as it happens, I had other testing to do, so serendipitous timing) and ping it. I got ping times as low as 8ms, but averaging around 11ms. The next thing I did was ping (from US-West EC2 instance) one of my favorite places to ping test: Hurricane Electric. They’ve got 2 locations in Fremont and 1 in San Jose.
The average ping time between EC2 and HE.net?
1.6 ms.
From those ping times, I’d suspect that either the US-West zone is IN the Hurricane Electric facilities, or RIGHT next door. It would make sense since they’ve got two availability zones (one in Fremont and one in San Jose, maybe?) which could use HE’s existing facility interconnects for free. I’ve also included the traceroute:

traceroute to he.net (216.218.186.2), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  ip-10-160-20-2.us-west-1.compute.internal (10.160.20.2)  0.652 ms  0.640 ms  0.628 ms
 2  216.182.236.73 (216.182.236.73)  51.287 ms  51.386 ms  51.551 ms
 3  72.21.222.228 (72.21.222.228)  1.290 ms  1.398 ms  1.510 ms
 4  72.21.222.195 (72.21.222.195)  2.008 ms  2.150 ms  2.145 ms
 5  paix.he.net (198.32.176.20)  1.840 ms  1.971 ms  2.111 ms
 6  10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.fmt1.he.net (66.160.158.241)  2.099 ms  1.870 ms  2.102 ms

Since it was worth investigating, I dug up more big colos in the Bay Area, starting with ColoServ, located in San Francisco itself, which had an average ping time of about 5ms. I found another in San Jose, namely Silicon Valley Web Hosting with which I got a ping time of about 3ms from EC2. I started to run out of local colos that I knew an address to ping, but I did give ServePath a shot too. They came in just under 4ms average.

Seeing as how a ping time of 1.6ms to he.net is astronomically low, a traceroute that shows packets basically never hitting the public internet, with the exception of going through PAIX… my money is on HE.net. More specifically their Warm Springs (Fremont 2) location, since it is 200,000 square feet. Supposedly it is (or was when it was built) the largest colo facility in the Bay Area. I could be wrong, but I know for a fact that wherever US-West EC2 is, it is in the Fremont to San Jose area. Ping times for anything else are just too high. Plus, why would Amazon pay more for hosting in San Francisco if they didn’t need to?