The article
At ten in the morning your cloud provider's status page turns orange: one region has a problem, and there is no estimate yet. Your app, your database and your file storage all live in that region. What happens next depends on two answers that someone either wrote down long ago or is about to improvise: how much data you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to wait. A disaster recovery as a service provider writes those answers down, builds the way back and rehearses it before the bad day comes.
I have been building software for 18 years. My company, 26 Lines of Code, has 70+ specialists, among them the DevOps engineers who set up recovery and the developers who write the steps for the app. Disaster recovery sits next to backup and migration among the cloud services we offer. Below are the two numbers that set the price, the three ways back, how we rehearse and a self-check for any recovery plan, ours included.
Cloud disaster recovery: the short version
| What | How it works with us |
|---|---|
| What you get | Copies of servers, databases and files in another region, written recovery steps, alerts and a plan for who does what |
| Where the copies live | AWS, Azure or Google Cloud: another region, or a second provider when one is not enough |
| Proof that it works | A real recovery run on a copy, before it is needed and after changes that touch it |
| Price | Named after we see your setup; the first call and a rough estimate are free |
| Who it is for | A business that loses orders, bookings or trust when its system stops |
Two numbers set the price: how much you can lose, how long you can wait
Every recovery setup answers two questions, and the answers decide what it costs:
- How much data can you lose? If the last copy was made at midnight and the failure comes at four in the afternoon, a day of orders is gone. More frequent copies shrink the loss and cost more. Engineers call this the recovery point objective, RPO.
- How long can you wait? Rebuilding servers from copies can take hours; switching to a copy that already runs takes far less and costs more to keep ready. This is the recovery time objective, RTO.
Price one hour of downtime before you choose: the orders, bookings or calls that do not happen, plus the work to catch up. The answer can differ by system, because the database that takes payments and the staff wiki rarely deserve the same plan.
Three ways back, and which system needs which
| Way back | How it works | Data lost and time waited | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restore from backup | Servers are rebuilt and data restored from copies when something fails | The most of the three, at the lowest running cost | Internal tools and sites that can pause |
| Standby copy | A smaller copy runs in another region and grows when it has to take over | Less of both; you pay to keep the copy ready | Shops, booking systems, client portals |
| Second live site | The system runs in two regions at once, and one carries on if the other fails | The least of both; you pay for two systems | Payments and services clients use every minute |
A mix is normal: orders on a standby copy, reports restored from backup. A standby copy or a second site also uses cloud resources, on top of the work of keeping it ready.
What a disaster recovery as a service provider sets up
Whichever way back you choose, the setup has five parts. Ask the disaster recovery as a service providers on your list to show you each of them:
- Copies in another region, where a single failure cannot reach them.
- Recovery steps written down in the order they run. On a bad day people follow a list.
- Access to the copies kept apart from the main account, so a break-in or a script that deletes the wrong things cannot reach them.
- Alerts that reach an engineer. A failure nobody notices for an hour adds an hour to the wait.
- A plan for who does what: who decides to switch, who runs the steps, who tells your clients.
Recovery is more than starting servers
Servers that start are not yet an app that works. Settings, secrets, queues and data have to come back in the right order, or the app starts and still fails. That is why our developers write the recovery steps with our DevOps engineers, and why a disaster recovery as a service company should know your code as well as your servers. A typical order:
- The database, from the last copy you trust, checked before anything writes to it.
- Passwords, keys and certificates, from a vault you can open while the main account is down.
- Settings for the database, the storage and every service the app talks to.
- Queues and background jobs, so half-finished work is redone, not lost.
- The app, then a test of sign-in, orders and payments.
- DNS, so users reach the copy. Each record has a time to live: set to a day, it keeps some users on the dead address for up to a day after you switch.
Meanwhile, visitors should see a page of your own, not a raw error. On our own site, the server in front of the application answers errors 502, 503 and 504 with a page rebuilt from the live content at every release.
Before writing this, I read five DRaaS pages Google showed for this search in October 2026. None publishes a price, and only two say how often to test: one promises an annual drill, the other recommends at least every quarter. None mentions DNS, and only one mentions passwords or keys, once. Five pages are a small sample, so read it as a list of questions to ask, not as a verdict.
From the first call to a rehearsed recovery
- Call. What your business runs on and what a stop would cost you.
- Map. Every server, database and service, and the order they need to start in.
- Setup. Copies in another region, and every recovery step in writing.
- Rehearsal. We run the recovery for real on a copy and fix what got in the way. Until a recovery has been run, its timing is a guess.
- Upkeep. The plan changes whenever your system does, and the next rehearsal checks the new steps.
Your part: the two answers above, access for the map, and one person who can say "switch" on a bad day.
Recovery starts in the code: what our projects show
Recovery thinking shows up in the products we build long before anyone calls it disaster recovery.
- Somatic Reset takes the payment before the slot. A payment counts only after a signed webhook and a fresh read from Stripe, and a background worker recovers failed payments and calendar events. The hard part: Stripe holds a checkout for at least 30 minutes, the product needed 10, so the worker closes the session and frees the slot only after Stripe confirms it. The site has 157 automated tests.
- Mutualz, a restaurant app from Germany on Flutter, Node.js and AWS, tracks orders, loyalty points and user activity end to end between the app, the restaurant and the backend, so nothing is lost on the way.
- AI Call Center processes every call inside the UAE, on local servers with locally hosted models, so where its data may live is part of the design. Ask your compliance advisor where yours may live; we build the recovery around the answer.
A recovery self-check you can run this week
Forward this table to whoever runs your system. A row nobody can answer is the first thing to fix.
| Question | Why it matters | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| How much data can we lose? | It sets how often copies are made | Ask whoever owns the revenue, not only IT |
| How long can we be down? | It sets the way back and its cost | Price one hour of downtime: orders, bookings, calls |
| When was a copy last restored? | A copy never restored may not restore | The date and the result of the last restore |
| Can the main login delete the copies? | One break-in should not take both | Who can reach the copies, and from which account |
| Where are the keys for the recovery? | A copy without them does not start | A vault you can open when the main account is down |
| How long do our DNS records live? | Users reach the dead address until it expires | The time to live of your main records |
| Who says "switch"? | An hour spent deciding is an hour of downtime | A name, a phone number and a second person |
When you do not need disaster recovery as a service
- A site that only presents the business can pause for a while: copies are enough, and for the sites we build, backups are part of website maintenance.
- Copies without a whole way back are cloud backup: stored apart from the originals and restored in tests.
- A setup that is itself the risk, such as an old server nobody understands, needs cloud migration or daily cloud management first, then a recovery plan.
Where to start
Tell us what must come back first. We go through what your business runs on and what a stop would cost, then propose a way back for each part and name the price. The first call and a rough estimate are free, and a new request gets an answer within 30 minutes on weekdays, 9:00-18:00 Miami time. Keeping intruders out of the main account is its own job: cloud security.
