That is not the industry standard for web hosting. Never has been, never will be.
Backups aren't free. Replication isn't free. DR isn't free. If a customer isn't paying a premium for them, they aren't getting them. Read the terms of service.
Intelligent people can argue all day about whether a snapshot should be considered a backup or not, but it won't change the fact that a snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage and it's ridiculously foolish for the owner of data to solely rely on snapshots as their backup strategy.
They literally use the word "backup." I wouldn't _normally_ expect snapshots to function as backups, but once they market them as such, I do. Yeah, sure, it's probably yet another case of a sales team getting over eager and taking over the company, but that's why if you value your ethics _at all_ you keep tabs on WTF the sales are doing.
So you're saying, against your admission of knowing better, that you can be literally swayed that a snapshot is a proper backup in the independent-of-the-original-storage sense, because their documentation equated the two?
The difference between a snapshot being a backup and not being a backup is literally the guarantees made by the provider. If the snapshot feature is documented as a backup, it is DOCUMENTED AS A BACKUP. Unless, of course, I suspect the provider of using the words as a way of confusing me, BUT THAT'S BAD. Like go read yourself a few times, you're literally defending them by claiming it's reasonable to treat them like scammers.
They can document it as anything.
A backup has to be isolated; different physical location, different medium, different provider. What if the technical infrastructure works as advertised, but the company goes into receivership for whatever reason?
Having cloud provider X say they moved the bits from one place to another should not be considered a backup by anyone, regardless of what they advertise.
>snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage
That depends on how snapshot storage is implemented by the hosting provider. They can use different storage for it, or tapes or whatever. On AWS I can easily have my snapshots on Glacier or copy them to a different data center.
IIRC you can do this by using AWS Backup. There's a setting in the... Plan? Policy? Sorry, it's been a while and there was a weird mismatch between the terraform documentation and the official Amazon documentation... anyways, there's a setting somewhere that says to move the backup to cold storage after a certain amount of time.
Backups aren't free. Replication isn't free. DR isn't free. If a customer isn't paying a premium for them, they aren't getting them. Read the terms of service.