Looking for a bulletproof web host with built-in colocation and failover.

November 10, 2008 3:33 PM

Looking at setting up a simple web site (no CGI) but needs to be up 24/7 and reasonably disaster proof (earthquake, hurricane, regional fires, etc.). Hosting company needs to be multisite with automagic failover assuming one site goes down.

Updates from primary to failover site can be as slow as hourly, they do not need to be in realtime. Minimal traffic (less than 2Gb/month). Don't care if it's straight hosting or a whole VPS, proc and memory usage should be minimal. Dedicated colo hardware would be overkill.

I realize there are various hand-rolled ways to achieve the same thing (rsync, cron, various DNS tricks spring to mind) but would prefer that the vendor worry about it. Most of the vendors I've found have a single bulletproof site but have no site failover.

posted by benzenedream to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You mention that the failover doesn't have to be realtime. Does it need to be automatic? If not, this is easily achieved by simply hosting multiple copies of your site in various geographic locations, then redirecting DNS at the time of a failure. This is the very purpose of DNS, it's not esoteric or tricky at all.

If it needs to be automatic, you can easily script DNS modifications with a DNS host like DynDNS.
posted by odinsdream at 3:51 PM on November 10, 2008

Akamai will do this for you and ask "What's next?".

Then they'll send a bill. But if the content must stay up, see them.
posted by bonaldi at 6:40 PM on November 10, 2008

Do you really mean bulletproof hosting?
posted by Brian Puccio at 2:02 AM on November 11, 2008

BP: Errr, no need to host exotic content in Russia.

Odinsdream: We already use Neustar for DNS services, they have a service called SiteBacker which does monitoring and failover. I'll check them out as well as DynDNS. A nightly scp cron job could do the rest. Since this is a DR site I was hoping to keep the number of vendors and contact numbers down.

Bonaldi: Is the price for Akamai an order of magnitude higher?
posted by benzenedream at 9:59 AM on November 11, 2008

OK, then I'd second the DNS idea. Set your TTL low (and hope ISPs; caching servers don't ignore it).
posted by Brian Puccio at 3:43 PM on November 11, 2008

So, I checked out a few other "grid computing" options that have somewhat distributed infrastructure for hosting.

Amazon - overkill for simple html hosting, but does offer possibility of multisite hosting as an option for EC3.
GoGrid - single building hosting in SF
Mosso - cool company with multiple sites in Texas, but no failover across sites (failover within sites is built in)

Akamai has multisite failover built in at a minimum of $1500/month, which is over our budget.

I will likely go the failover DNS TTL route as Brian suggested and get two medium price hosts with a nightly mirroring rsync script.
posted by benzenedream at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2008

DNSmadeEasy hosts DNS records with auto failover for reasonably cheap prices. We will likely go with them as a first pass.
posted by benzenedream at 2:15 AM on December 11, 2008