WPCloud Disaster Recovery (DR) Process

At WPCloud, our top priority is the availability and security of your data. To ensure a reliable service, we have established a comprehensive Disaster Recovery (DR) plan that helps us mitigate risks and recover swiftly in the event of a disaster.

Our servers are structured into redundant clusters within each data center. Each cluster is designed to take over in case of a failure in the primary cluster, ensuring service availability and preventing data loss.

We perform two separate backup jobs daily, creating a reliable data safeguard. These backups are stored in two geographically distinct data centres across the country, far removed from our hosting centres, adding another layer of protection against localized disasters. Our backups are retained for a minimum of 30 days, giving us the capability to restore data from any point within the past month.

Although clients already have direct access to their backups, we offer an additional add-on service for maintaining that access even during a multi-centre emergency. This service is designed to give you more control over your data and enhance your own disaster recovery capabilities.

We can restore our backups to any data center, enhancing our resilience against large-scale disruptions. This means we're not tied to a single location and can keep your services up and running even if multiple data centres are affected.

To ensure near-real-time data consistency, our production servers are replicated to failover clusters every 15 minutes. These clusters, located in a different data centre, stand ready to take over in the event of a serious incident or extensive hardware failure.

Our DR protocols define a server or cluster unavailability extending beyond 2 hours as an emergency. This triggers our disaster recovery process, which is designed to restore services as quickly as possible.

Upon triggering of the DR process, our sysadmin team moves to migrate IPs to our failover clusters. This process is optimized to take no more than 1 hour. This means the maximum recovery time from the initial failure to service restoration is capped at 3 hours.

Once the failover clusters take over serving production sites, our team assesses the situation at the original data centre. Depending on the evaluation, a decision is made either to continue serving from the failover clusters or to migrate services onto new production clusters. This flexibility allows us to respond dynamically to evolving situations.

We have a dedicated incident response team trained to manage emergency situations. This team leads disaster response operations and coordinates communication with clients and stakeholders.

Staff training is a cornerstone of our disaster recovery process. Regular sessions ensure that all members understand their roles in the DR process and can perform them efficiently. Furthermore, we conduct monthly testing and reviews of our disaster recovery protocols. This proactive approach helps us identify areas for potential improvement and incorporate the latest best practices.

Following any incident, we undertake a thorough review to understand its root cause and impacts. This analysis informs our ongoing efforts to improve our systems and processes, helping us prevent similar incidents in the future.

We invite external experts to audit our DR process regularly. These audits provide a fresh perspective and help us ensure that our standards remain high and in line with industry best practices.

During an incident, we believe in maintaining open and clear communication. Our status page, hosted by an independent third-party provider, serves as our primary communication channel. This ensures that our updates are accessible even during large-scale disruptions. If, for any reason, the status page becomes unavailable, we will then provide updates via our support portal. As a final redundancy measure, we would use email to communicate.

Our commitment is to provide updates approximately every 15 minutes during an incident. Regular, timely updates help ensure transparency and give you insights into our recovery process and when you can expect services to be fully restored.

Our SLA ensures a high availability of 99.95% in any given calendar month. This level of uptime means that you can rely on our services to be there when you need them. For more details on our SLA, please visit https://wpcloud.ca/legal-main-service-level-agreement/

At WPCloud, we take cybersecurity seriously. Our security measures include firewalls to block unauthorized access, intrusion detection systems to identify potential threats, and encryption protocols to secure your data both at rest and in transit. These measures help protect your data from cyber threats and maintain the integrity and confidentiality of your information.

In addition to our comprehensive disaster recovery process, we are committed to maintaining preparedness through regular audits, reviews, and updates of our strategies and recovery procedures. We believe in the importance of continual learning and improvement to ensure we provide you with the best possible service.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Our RTO is 3 hours, meaning we aim to restore services within 3 hours of an incident.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Our RPO is 15 minutes, meaning we strive to minimize data loss to within the last 15 minutes of operation before an incident.

Testing Frequency: We conduct comprehensive DR testing quarterly to ensure our protocols are effective and up-to-date.

Cybersecurity: We employ robust cybersecurity measures, including multi-factor authentication, 256-bit encryption for data at rest and in transit, and regular vulnerability assessments, to protect your data from cyber threats.

Client Responsibilities: To ensure a smooth DR process, we ask clients to maintain updated contact information, and communicate their preferred communication channels during incidents.

At WPCloud, we are dedicated to delivering reliable and resilient hosting services. Despite the robust precautions in place, we recognize that disasters can occur. When they do, our priority is to minimize downtime and ensure a speedy recovery. Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining high standards of data security and availability.