A long long time ago, I bought a domain or two, and a shared hosting plan from Dreamhost w/ unlimited bandwidth/storage. I don’t have root access, and can’t do containers on this. It’s been useful for a Piwigo instance to share scanned family photos. The problem I have is the limited resources really limit Piwigo’s ability to handle the large TIF files involved in the archival scans. There are ways around this, but they all add time to the workflow that already eats into my free time enough. I’m looking at moving Piwigo to my local server that has plenty of available resources. That leaves me with little reason to keep the Dreamhost space. So what’s a decent use case for cheap, shared hosting space anymore?
To be clear, I’m not looking for suggestions to move to a cheap VPS. I’ve looked into them, and might use one in the future, but don’t need it right now. The shared hosting costs about $10.99/month at the moment. If there was a way I could leverage the unlimited bandwidth/storage as an offsite backup, that would be amazing, but I’m not sure it would be a great idea backing up stuff to a webserver where there best security I can add it via an .htaccess file.
As others said, encrypt your backup before sending it to your server. And can’t you upload the files to a folder outside of a document root or better outside of the www folder so there is no way to access it through the web server service?
I can upload files outside of the docroot, but if they stay there for too long, I get a nasty email from Dreamhost reminding me that this is for web space and not offsite storage (something they also sell). I haven’t tried uploading something inside the docroot and just setting permissions to 400 or something!