One of the reasons why having boxes in a data center would be good.
If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly, Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house seems like a shoestring budget.
Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was.
But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost. Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem?
Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in, and from what is written it sounds like the internet connection was insanely slow.
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
with the wrong admin access, cloud data can be wiped just as easily :-(