Disaster Recovery Planning for Pakistani IT Teams: The Hosting Layer

Most Pakistani IT teams do not have a disaster recovery plan — they have a backup. These are not the same thing, and the difference becomes catastrophically clear at 2 AM when a server fails, a database corrupts, or a ransomware attack encrypts your production environment. This guide gives Pakistani IT teams a complete, actionable DR framework with specific hosting layer decisions, RPO/RTO targets, and a 72-hour recovery playbook.

The Pakistan-Specific Risk Landscape

Disaster recovery planning must start with an honest assessment of the threats you are planning against. Pakistan's IT infrastructure faces a specific risk profile that generic DR guides from Western markets do not adequately address.

PTCL and ISP Outage Risk

Pakistan's internet backbone is more concentrated than most markets. Major PTCL outages have historically caused widespread internet disruptions that persist for hours or days. In 2022, Pakistan experienced multiple national internet disruptions caused by undersea cable faults. Any Pakistani IT team whose DR plan depends on internet connectivity being available during a disaster is planning against the wrong assumptions.

DR implication: Your recovery documentation, recovery tools, and at least one recovery path must function without reliable public internet access. Critical system documentation should be maintained offline.

Load Shedding and Power Infrastructure

Load shedding — national power outages lasting 2–12 hours daily in many areas — remains a reality for Pakistani businesses in 2026. A data centre without a tier-appropriate UPS and generator arrangement is not a data centre — it is a shared computer room with scheduled downtime.

Before selecting any hosting provider for business-critical systems, verify:

Generator capacity and fuel autonomy (minimum 72 hours)
UPS tier (Tier III minimum for critical systems)
Transfer switch reliability track record
Whether generator tests are conducted under actual load

Karachi-based data centres serving the commercial sector generally have better power infrastructure than Lahore and Islamabad-based facilities, though the gap has narrowed. Ask providers for their uptime logs, not their SLA promises.

Cybersecurity Threat Landscape

Pakistan has seen a significant increase in ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) incidents targeting SMEs and government-adjacent organisations. CERT-in's regional data and Pakistan's own FIA Cyber Crime wing incident reports indicate that Pakistani businesses are increasingly targeted by automated threat actors that scan for unpatched systems and exploit them opportunistically.

Your DR plan must explicitly account for ransomware: a backup that is connected to your production network at the time of a ransomware attack will be encrypted along with everything else. Air-gapped or immutable backups are not optional for Pakistani businesses — they are the minimum standard.

RTO and RPO: Definitions With Pakistani Business Context

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable time between a disaster event and your systems being back online. RTO is a business decision, not a technical one. What is the cost per hour of your systems being down?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. If your RPO is 4 hours, you must have backup data no older than 4 hours at the time of any failure. This determines your backup frequency.

RTO/RPO Targets by Business Type

| Business Type | Suggested RTO | Suggested RPO | Cost of Downtime Reference | |---|---|---|---| | E-commerce (WooCommerce) | 2–4 hours | 1–4 hours | PKR 15,000–120,000/hour | | SaaS product | 1–2 hours | 15–60 minutes | PKR 50,000–500,000/hour | | Corporate website + CRM | 4₀24 hours | 24 hours | PKR 5,000–25,000/hour | | Financial/Banking system | 15–30 minutes | Near-zero (synchronous replication) | PKR 500,000+/hour | | Informational/Marketing site | 24–48 hours | 24–48 hours | PKR 1,000–5,000/hour |

SECP and SBP compliance consideration: Financial institutions and fintechs operating under SECP or SBP oversight must align their RTO/RPO targets with regulatory requirements around systems availability. SBP's guidelines on digital banking operations specify minimum availability standards. Confirm your DR targets with your compliance team against current regulatory guidance.

Three Tiers of DR Architecture

Tier 1: Cold Standby (Basic Protection)

What it is: Regular backups sent to an off-site location. In a disaster, you restore from backups onto new infrastructure.

RTO range: 4–48 hours (depending on data volume and provisioning time)
RPO range: 1–24 hours (depending on backup frequency)

Cost: PKR 5,000–25,000/month (backup storage + automation tools)

Best for: SMEs, informational sites, low-revenue applications

Minimum viable cold standby for a Pakistani WordPress/WooCommerce site:

# Automated daily backup to Backblaze B2 (cheapest reliable cloud storage)
# Install on your cPanel or VPS server

# 1. Install Backblaze B2 CLI
curl -LO https://github.com/Backblaze/B2_Command_Line_Tool/releases/latest/download/b2-linux
chmod +x b2-linux && mv b2-linux /usr/local/bin/b2

# 2. Authenticate (store credentials in environment variables, not scripts)
export B2_APPLICATION_KEY_ID="your-key-id"
export B2_APPLICATION_KEY="your-application-key"
b2 authorize-account

# 3. Cron job: daily DB backup + file backup (add to crontab -e)
# Run at 2:30 AM daily
30 2 * * * /usr/bin/mysqldump -u dbuser -p'dbpassword' yourdb | gzip > /tmp/db_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).sql.gz && b2 upload-file your-bucket-name /tmp/db_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).sql.gz backups/db_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).sql.gz

# 4. Weekly full file archive
0 3 * * 0 tar -czf /tmp/www_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).tar.gz /var/www/html/ && b2 upload-file your-bucket-name /tmp/www_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).tar.gz backups/www_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).tar.gz

# Backblaze B2 storage cost: approximately PKR 830/TB/month
# 10GB website backup: ~PKR 8/month in storage

Tier 2: Warm Standby (Business Continuity)

What it is: A secondary server pre-provisioned with your application (or a recent snapshot of it) that can be activated within minutes to hours.

RTO range: 30 minutes – 4 hours
RPO range: 15 minutes – 2 hours

Cost: PKR 20,000–80,000/month (secondary server + synchronisation tools)

Implementation for a Pakistani mid-scale application: A warm standby VPS pre-loaded with your application container image, with database replication streaming hourly snapshots from primary to standby. A DNS failover mechanism switches traffic to the standby in under 5 minutes when primary fails.

Tier 3: Hot Standby / High Availability

What it is: Active-active or active-passive cluster with real-time or near-real-time replication. No manual failover required.

RTO range: Under 2 minutes (often sub-30-second)
RPO range: Near-zero (synchronous replication) to 5 minutes (asynchronous)

Cost: PKR 80,000–400,000/month+

Best for: High-revenue e-commerce, SaaS, financial applications

Compliance Considerations: SECP, NEPRA, and SBP

Pakistani IT teams in regulated sectors face specific DR documentation requirements:

SECP-registered entities: Companies registered with SECP operating digital products are expected to maintain business continuity plans as part of their operational risk management framework. The DR plan should be a documented, tested, board-reviewed process — not a technical team's private wiki.

SBP-licensed entities: Pakistan's Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) and Digital Banks face the most stringent requirements. SBP's technology risk management guidelines specify minimum backup frequency, off-site storage requirements, and recovery testing schedules.

NEPRA-related considerations: Utility companies and NEPRA-regulated entities operating digital systems have sector-specific continuity requirements. Consult your legal team on current obligations.

The 72-Hour Recovery Playbook

Hour 0–1: Triage and Decision

[ ] Declare the incident and activate your DR team (named individuals, not just roles)
[ ] Assess damage scope: is this a single server failure, a complete infrastructure failure, or a security incident requiring forensics?
[ ] If security incident: isolate affected systems immediately before beginning recovery to avoid reinfecting clean environments
[ ] Identify your last known clean backup timestamp
[ ] Communicate to stakeholders: expected recovery time, what is affected, what is not affected

Hour 1–6: Infrastructure Recovery

[ ] Provision replacement infrastructure (cloud VPS spin-up: typically 5–15 minutes on modern providers)
[ ] Restore most recent clean backup to new environment
[ ] Verify backup integrity (do not skip this — a corrupt backup restoration wastes hours)
[ ] Do not restore from backup taken after the incident window if security event is suspected
[ ] Run smoke tests: can the application start? Can it connect to the database? Can users authenticate?

Hour 6–24: Verification and Soft Restoration

[ ] Run full functional tests against restored environment
[ ] Verify data integrity for the most critical data (orders, financial transactions, user accounts)
[ ] Identify data loss window (what transactions occurred between last backup and incident?)
[ ] Manual data recovery where possible for the data loss window (payment records, WhatsApp order confirmations, etc.)
[ ] Bring a small subset of traffic to restored environment (10–20%) before full DNS cutover

Hour 24–72: Full Restoration and Hardening

[ ] Complete DNS cutover to restored environment
[ ] Monitor error rates actively for 48 hours post-restoration
[ ] Conduct root cause analysis
[ ] Address the root cause (patch the vulnerability, fix the hardware, update the configuration) before declaring incident closed
[ ] Document the incident in full — timeline, root cause, recovery actions, data loss assessment
[ ] Update DR plan based on lessons learned
[ ] Schedule a DR test drill within 30 days to verify the updated DR plan works

Cost Tiers for DR by Business Size

| Business Size | DR Tier | Monthly Cost (PKR) | RTO Target | PKR Annual DR Budget | |---|---|---|---|---| | Startup / 1-10 person SME | Cold Standby | PKR 5,000–15,000 | 4–48 hours | PKR 60,000–180,000 | | Mid-scale SME | Warm Standby | PKR 20,000–60,000 | 1–4 hours | PKR 240,000–720,000 | | Revenue-critical application | Hot Standby | PKR 80,000–200,000 | Under 30 min | PKR 960,000–2,400,000 | | Enterprise / Regulated | Full HA Cluster | PKR 200,000–600,000+ | Under 5 min | PKR 2,400,000–7,200,000 |

Your Hosting Layer Matters

Even the best DR plan is undermined by a hosting provider that cannot provision replacement infrastructure quickly, cannot restore snapshots reliably, or whose support team is unavailable during a 3 AM crisis.

Pakish.net's (/hosting) are built for Pakistani businesses that take uptime seriously. We offer automated daily backups, snapshot-based rapid VPS provisioning, and support that responds to critical incidents around the clock.

For businesses requiring (/managed-wordpress-hosting) with built-in backup management and staging environments, our managed plans include automated off-site backup with configurable retention periods.

If your current hosting provider cannot answer the question "how long does it take to restore a 20GB database from backup?" with a specific number, that is a gap in your DR posture. (https://my.pakish.net/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=1) to discuss upgrading your hosting layer as part of a broader DR strategy.