No, the site is not back yet. I’m most of way through recovering data from the database. Hopefully it will be functional later today.
I’m open to discussing people’s ideas, but this could end up being a rather involved change to the hosting configuration. Moving to multiple servers and replication is going to take time and testing, and we’d need double the server resources. We could opt for a simpler mirror of the channel data, but then that leaves the service still degraded (usage submission and website would be offline) and still requiring disaster recovery involving database recovery/restoration.
My plan for now is to throw a little more money at the situation rather than time. If I add block storage to the VM, I can return to doing full daily dumps and compressing those and sending them to my NAS. I can also pay to enable Linode’s backups that will give me a couple of snapshots of the server at preset intervals.