Having just suffered a ransomware attack with another ESP whose virtualization platform, like LiquidWeb's, is based on Windows HyperVisor, we're particularly sensitive to the real-world downsides of having Windows in our enterprise.

Should LW, while unlikely, suffer a similar fate of having the Windows host servers our Linux instances are hosted on get encrypted, having the images off site and on our own offsite backups, we'd be able to re-upload the images to LW and restore service again.

As it stands now, while unlikely, it is possible for the host server to be encrypted and for the onsite backups at LW on the 'secure storage' where our images are stored to be encrypted.

In our case, they both encrypted the Windows host servers we were on and also destroyed the "secure storage" system at our other provider.

Were we able to download backups of these images, reconstituting business would be a simple matter of uploading our saved images.

Instead, in a worst case scenario, our only choice is to rebuild servers from scratch, reinstall and configure the software, and re-upload our data.

I understand if the hesitance to provide this feature is because if you were to provide customers with copies of the images, they could in theory just move the instances to another ESP that supports image uploads; however, this could easily be countered by LW encrypting these images or through similar obfuscation techniques that would render these images useless outside LW.