It sounds like they had their backups stored on a home machine and had to deal with a slow uplink to restore them. A cheap alternative is to use an inexpensive

It sounds like they had their backups stored on a home machine and had to deal with a slow uplink to restore them. A cheap alternative is to use an inexpensive (but reliable) shared hosting provider for off-site backup. Don't use the account for serving web pages -- just use it as a fast, cheap parking spot for backup archives.