Redundancy for our website

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nate

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Topic # 30139 29-Jan-2009 20:45

I'm planning on adding a status box to our website to inform our clients of when our web-hoster has outages, upgrades etc. It has dawned on me that we also host our website with that same webhoster, so in the event on an outage, our website would also be down.

What can I do to ensure our website stays up? I need some ideas for not only synchronising our site between two different hosters, but also what we need to do with our domain's A record to ensure an automatic switch over.

(Yes I know we could just settle with one separate hoster, but the above sounds like more of a challenge)

Regs

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Reply # 192798 29-Jan-2009 21:32

unless you put ridiculously low TTLs (time to live) on your A records your web site is going to be down untill the ttl expires on the original record. Best practise is for TTLs to be measures in hours, or even days, so this might not be a approach that is workable.

An alternative is two A records for the website - you will then probably get the ip handed out by dns in a round robin style - this means your second provider would get every second request, for example

your best bet is really to choose a hosting provider that isnt going to give you much in the way of outages - e.. a hoster with clustering across a couple of data centers and self repairing routing

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chrisjunkie

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Reply # 192823 29-Jan-2009 22:40

Depends on what you think will be going down.

If you think it will be your webserver then just install heartbeat and use virtual ip's (if your using linux?) I have this set up at home through my pfsense box and it works well. web1 falls over and web2 is grabbing requests almost simultaneously.

If your internet goes down then this is a problem. If you want to sync the website somewhere else then maybe have a server set up somewhere that redirects your requests? I have seen something on a forum somewhere about this being done. Unfortunately I cant remember where...

Hope you find a solution!

Ragnor

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Reply # 192841 30-Jan-2009 02:02

Assuming this is for 3bit..

Looking at the whois, it's hosted by web drive who use maxnet's data center in Albany. Web drive state they have:

    * 2 x 155mb fibre through Telecom and TelstraClear.
    * 1 x Gbps fibre circuit through Vector Communications.
    * Peering through Auckland APE and WIX exchanges.

.. so network outages shouldn't be a problem. Which means you just need to look at load balanced web servers. I would think Web Drive would be able offer you load balanced or clustered hosting/servers if you asked them.