What's the difference between a hot, warm or cold DR site, and which fits us?
Hot is live and synchronous, warm is on standby with hours of delay, cold is a box you still have to build. The pick depends on your RTO and how much you'll pay for downtime protection.
Try this first
- 1Hot: identical production elsewhere with live replication. RTO in minutes, RPO near zero. Effectively doubles cost and needs automatic failover. Usually overkill for SMB.
- 2Warm: hardware ready, OS and apps preinstalled, data replicated every X hours. RTO hours, RPO up to a day. Costs 30-70% of production depending on setup.
- 3Cold: space with power and network, hardware added after a disaster. RTO days, RPO tied to your last offsite backup. Cheap to run, you pay in time when it breaks.
- 4Decide only after answering: what does a day of downtime cost us in revenue, customers and fines? Below a threshold cold is fine, above it warm, and only if downtime is genuinely catastrophic, hot.
- 5For SMB the common variant is 'cloud-warm': backups in a cloud provider, with a pre-built template that spins up servers in a few hours when production goes down.
- 6Build a DR runbook and run an annual tabletop. A DR site you never practise is an expensive illusion.
When to bring us in
In regulated sectors (healthcare, financial) or with customers who contractually demand DR, get a DR architect to size RTO and RPO against cost. Cheapest is rarely right.
See also
- We have backups but we do not know if they workA backup that cannot be restored is not a backup. Testing matters as much as taking the backup.
- Suspected ransomware: what to do RIGHT NOWThe first 30 minutes are critical. One wrong move spreads the damage. Read before acting.
- Someone accidentally deleted an important folderUsually fine to recover. The trick: do not save anything new on that drive until you know how.
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