Rather than giving myself and my clients the hassle of having to provide host servers for their websites, I have been using Verio servers for many years now.Verio backups their servers on a daily basis and you have a 24-hour window in which to retrieve any files, directories, or sites from the backup directory. Anything over that 24-hour period, may be available but at a fee.

In addition to this backup, I have been using Akeeba Backup and placing the backup files in a directory in the site file structure. While this does prove to be helpful from time-to-time, a problem can occur when the disc crashes and takes both the site and the backup files simulataneously.

With all the buzz of the cloud and Amazon's backup service floating around the Internet, I decided to begin a study case with backing up dfi-america.com to the Amazon Cloud using the S3 services.

Setting up the account was fairly easy. Once you log in you see the following screen.

Akeeba Backup provides a function that allows automatic backup to cloud servers including Amazon S3 so I am using that.

The Amazon layout is simple and straightforward.

The second image shows that there have been three backups.

The third images shows the costs so-far incurred for the month of December. The costs are clearly minimal and suggest that the storing data for a small company in the Amazon cloud would be not only be extremely inexpensive but considerably more secure and safe as well.

Getting the backup files to the Amazon cloud is automated using a cron setting to execute a backup function provided in Akeeba.

If you use a *nix system you can manually set up the following command in a cron file. It is much easier if you are using a Verio VPS server.

in the appropriate box, save it, and viola! Done!!

You should see the completed cron as shown at the red arrow.