Disaster recovery responsibilities: what Nexcess owns and what you own

When you choose managed disaster recovery (DR), getting your system back online as quickly as possible depends on partnership. Nexcess provisions your server, verifies the network parth, monitors, and tests, while your team decides when to declare an outage and controls your domain settings. Knowing who handles every task before an emergency happens ensures a fast recovery during a disaster.

What Nexcess owns in DR, and what stays yours

What Nexcess owns for DR and what stays yours is defined for every stage of an outage. The table below breaks down the division of duties from setup through post-incident review:

Nexcess owns	You own
Setting up your recovery environment during onboarding and verifying network paths before an outage occurs.	Naming authorized contacts in writing who have the authority to declare a disaster.
Monitoring data replication health and alerting your team if a data sync stops.	Deciding when to declare a disaster and giving the official sign off to begin recovery.
Collaborating with you to write your recovery runbook which includes server inventory and boot order.	Controlling your domain settings and updating DNS records so traffic goes to your standby site.
Running scheduled test failovers and saving timestamped records for compliance and audit proof.	Testing your applications after servers boot up to verify database and web services work.
Seeding and validating replication during onboarding, and triaging replication alerts if a sync falls behind	Executing failover steps on Essential and Pro plans while Nexcess engineers guide you on the line.
Updating your recovery runbook when you tell us your environment has changed, like new servers or a different start order	Signing off on failback windows when returning traffic to your primary environment.

The DR responsibility that changes with your plan

The DR responsibility that changes with your plan is who runs the failover. On the Essential and Pro plans, Nexcess engineers walk your team through the runbook, while your team starts the failover. On the Elite plan, Nexcess runs the failover and failback for you.

On every plan, you decide when to declare a disaster. Recovery starts when you say so.

If you are ready to map out your recovery responsibilities, talk to a Nexcess engineer to review your current setup and build your custom plan.