I'm a senior backend tech lead in Paris and I run HostingGuru, a managed PaaS. I'll mention HG exactly once near the end. Everything else in this article works on any platform you ship on. A founder DMed me last month about a Render Postgres instance that had been humming along for nine months without a hiccup. Stripe charges going through, customers happy, MRR pushing past €4k. He wanted my opinion on something else, but during the call I asked how often his database backed up. He paused, opened the Render dashboard, clicked Postgres, then Backups, and saw exactly one snapshot from the day he provisioned the instance. This is not rare. I review side projects and small SaaS stacks every week, and "zero working backups" is the single most common operational bug in the deployment of someone who shipped fast and learned to operate later. It's also the cheapest bug in the world to fix. You can wire up a working strategy in twenty minutes.…