Web hosting - need high uptime solution
 

I need a recommendation for a high-uptime web hosting solution.

My current provider is not meeting my uptime requirements. My site has been down since Thursday PM. This is the second significant outage this year.

I need to find a high-uptime solution, I would consider a few hours of downtime per year acceptable. No more.

I think this means redundant servers/network.

What is the best way to accomplish this?

Can I have two seperate web hosting providers (each with a mirror of my site), and arrange the web traffic to route to whichever one is up?

Are there web hosting providers that provide this as a standard service (instead of rolling my own)?

signed - frustrated in San Jose

I've used Westhost for almost 10 years (www.westhost.com). My site has never been down for more than an hour or two. Support emails are always answered quickly.

Hey Chuck,

What is your budget? There are plenty of providors that can fill your needs for the right price. I've taken care of hosting for a couple websites for companies I've worked for. If you don't want too much info public then PM me instead. I'm glad to help.

I'm not looking to spend a ton of money on this. And I'm not demanding zero downtime, I just need better than I've got.

Maybe I just need to swap providers to one with a better uptime record, like Todd's suggestion.

But reaching back to my (dusty) techy days, can't I set up a primary and secondary DNS to point to two different servers? Thus providing a fallback in the event the primary server is down.

Two $10/mos shared host plans that mirror each other, and the proper DNS configuration and I'm done? Am I totally off base?

I've been pretty happy with site5.com

We use godaddy.com... excellent service and our sites have never been down. We especially like their advertising mascot. ;)

Chuck,

For that price range you aren't going to get real failover. As 930addict points out you can have two servers with two different hosting companies. If one goes down you could go to your registrar, and change your DNS record. But I have seen it take up to three days for the changes to get propagated to all the DNS servers on the net. I would recommend againt doing it that way.

I would find a more reliable hosting service. I would second godaddy.com as a good for the price range you are looking for.

DNS should never be used as a "failover" solution, as it does take a fair bit of time for things to propagate, and most ISP's that people use to connect to the Internet don't follow proper "time-to-live" rules anyway, so even if you DO change the values, it could take days for your end-user to see the change.

As well, the way you have it described, you'd basically split your traffic between the two sites, regardless if they were operational or not.

And, you'd have to deal with maintaining duplicate web sites on each server. A real PITA.

You also don't mention what kind of "stuff" you need on your web site? Does it use PHP, JSP, or another language to create the pages? Does it use a database? Are you using any kind of "built-in" software that comes with your current provider? (gallery, chat, etc) How much space do you need to host your files? There are a LOT of things that could impact on where you go for your hosting.

I've had really, really good luck using RackSpace for some of my clients (http://www.rackspace.com).

You might want to give them a shout and see what they offer. (They offer a 100% network uptime, and 1 hour hardware replacement).

Odds are, though, that they're going to be too much for what you really need, and in that case I'd recommend checking out Mosso (http://www.mosso.com) , one of their partners.

I've heard good things about them.


...jeff

I'm really happy with my linode.com server - of course, going with that option means *you* do everything to the box once the basic OS is installed. But they have a variety of specs for the virtual machines, you can do anything you want on 'em, and they are rock solid. Cheap too. What exactly are you serving up?

I moved my site last night to a new hosting provider. The DNS propagation was surprisingly fast, I was getting traffic within a couple hours.

My old provider is still down - goodbye! I won't be back.

I understand the propagation delay issue with my "ghetto" redundant server idea above. How about this idea instead:

2 servers, each from a different hosting provider and with static IPs. I use a self-managed nameserver, which is my means of controlling the swapover. Normally all traffic goes to the server designated as primary.

In the event the primary goes down, I change the IP at the namerservers to point to the secondary server.

It's not hot-standby, but at least I should be able to redirect traffic within minutes of identifying the outage.

The secondary server doesn't really have to be fully current, I can update it as soon as the problem is identified. I don't keep any mission-critical databases on the web server.

Would that work?

No. If you have your own nameserver you are the only one using that nameserver for name lookup. Other people use nameservers local to them usually from an ISP or the company they work for. Other nameservers on the net will query your nameserver if they know about it. The information on your nameserver is propogated across the internet when other nameservers query yours. This propagation begins almost immediately, but takes up to a few days to get to everyone.

First thing you ahve to do is determine what kind of failure you're trying to deal with... if it's simply a network failure, then just find a single provider that has proper network failover onto multiple Internet feeds and doesn't just rely on a single one.

A TON of mom-and-pop hosting solutions use a single source, and don't have proper network failover, so there are a lot of single points of failure in their topology.

When you get to a much bigger, professional hosting service, these problems tend to be handled because they've invested in a more robust network infrastructure.

I'd be tempted to call the sales guy for your new solution and ask him about their network infrastructure, and pointedly ask him/her how they deal with the situation you experienced with your last provider.

That being said, you can do what you wish as a backup... set up the DNS as you mentioned (at a separate location from your current hosting service) but I don't see why you should go out and configure and pay for the 2nd site right now... wait until your first one fails (if it does), and then get it set up. You can be up and running in minutes via credit card at a number of alternates.

$0.02

And Ed is correct about the DNS... when an ISP queries your DNS server, more often than not they cache the value in their local lookup, and will hold it there for a few days before going and checking it against your DNS server again.

They are supposed to follow something called the TTL (time to live) that determines how long that value should stay in their cache.

Typically, DNS service providers set this value (by default) at 1-3 days.

Personally, I set it to 1 hour, as I'd rather get a crap-load of DNS lookups than wait that long.

But, like I said, there are a TON of DNS servers that ISP's have their clients use that do NOT follow the TTL settings.

So, that means that while some clients might see your site almost immediately (either they're doing their first DNS resolution on your site, or their ISP actually follows the TTL settings), I can guarantee you that others are not, and it will be days before the worst cases do.

Yeah, DNS is UGLY.

It's one of those things that you want to set up once, and just let it run and run without changing it for as long as you can get away with.