Outside Of Your Own Server, What's REALLY Foolproof?

[Steven Wagenheim]

Okay, I've had a lot of time to do a lot of thinking about not just hosting
but relying on anybody but yourself for anything.

Hypothetical situation.

Let's say you get a dedicated server.

Great.

Okay, but if something happens (it goes down, gets hacked or whatever)
you still have to contact somebody and that person has to get you back
in working order.

And that person can be out of town, in the hospital or worse.

My point is, no matter what kind of hosting solution you use (unless it's
your own server in your own home) you are still dependent on another
person to keep you in business.

So is there really a perfect solution that you can totally 100% depend on
not to give you a coronary when you wake up in the morning?

[kavi]

Hi Steven,

Normally when you get a dedicated server, the datacenter has a team who will work 24/7 to keeping everything running. It's not a one man operation. You just have to use a company who has a good track record. I've had several server crashes, drive failures in the last few years and was always able to count on the people from whom I lease my servers to get them back online (sure it takes a couple of hours if it's a drive failure but if you do regular backups, you don't have to worry too much)

Kavi

[John Taylor]

Steven,

I've run my own hosting company for several years and
I can tell you from hard won experience that there is
nothing that is totally reliable no matter how much back
up and redundancy you have built into your system.

If you plan on managing less than 100 websites, then
a good reseller package from a well established hosting
provider will be adequate.

If you want more control, then you could go with a VPS
or even a dedicated server. HOWEVER, unless you are
sufficiently competent in server administration, you will
probably end up being worse off if anything goes wrong.

Stick to a managed server environment, with a company
with a reputation for excellent uptime and 24/7 customer
service.

John

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by John Taylor

Steven,

I've run my own hosting company for several years and
I can tell you from hard won experience that there is
nothing that is totally reliable no matter how much back
up and redundancy you have built into your system.

If you plan on managing less than 100 websites, then
a good reseller package from a well established hosting
provider will be adequate.

If you want more control, then you could go with a VPS
or even a dedicated server. HOWEVER, unless you are
sufficiently competent in server administration, you will
probably end up being worse off if anything goes wrong.

Stick to a managed server environment, with a company
with a reputation for excellent uptime and 24/7 customer
service.

John

Thank you so very much John. That is pretty much what I figured.

The problem I just ran into was actually caused by PayPal and had
nothing to do with the hosting company or the reseller account person.

Long story that I won't get into but it's just one more PayPal horror
story that doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

[lharding]

I guess at least with a dedicated server (which will be backed-up) you can find sys admins for hire easily. Yes, you're always have to rely upon someone, but that's life.

Best option, 2 dedicated servers, 1 in UK 1 in US. If your business makes you a living, why would you not invest in this side of things. Have 1 server a copy of the other. If disaster strikes, you only have to change your domains to point at your healthy server. Then go fix your broken one.

Cheers, Lee

[Steve Diamond]

Steven, if you're really looking for a more reliable hosting situation, there are companies like RackSpace that will sell you fully managed hosting with clustered servers, mirrors, auto-failover, proactive monitoring, and any other bell or whistle you can imagine. But this is many, many times more expensive than the "lightly managed" dedicated servers you'll get from the kind of hosting company that most folks who hang out here use.

Steve

[Ankesh Kothari]

Ok 100% reliability is not possible. In the last 3 months - amazon and rackspace both have gone down. So even if you have 2-3 servers - your site may still go down.

So a better question is:
i. How to reduce downtime to a minimum
ii. Support to speedimum
iii. And make everything fit your budget

Your options:

i. Go with amazon web services. A bit techie to setup. But its cloud hosting at its best. Very easy to scale. And you pay only for what you use. They start at $90 a month.

ii. Or go with completely managed dedicated hosting or managed VPS hosting with a provider who guarantee a 30 minute support timeframe. Keyword is managed. I use liquidweb.com and love them - they usually answer emails within 10 minutes. They start at $60 per month.

Of course if you can't afford $60 or so - go with dreamhost.com or hostgator.com or some shared hosting with "relatively" better support (all shared hosting support is poor in my experience). Less than $10 a month.

[Sleaklight]

I disagree in the comment that you need someone else. I've owned my own servers for the past 7 years and only pay for colocating them. I do all the management, setup, configuring, security etc. It's all a matter of taking the time and wanting to do it yourself. Sure, it would be nice to pay someone to do all the technical work but as much as I'd like that, the info on the server is not worth risking to someone who might make a run with it (It's happened to me before). I also hate being in the datacenter as it is a loud and cold place lol Being there for a couple of hours gets to ya.

However, I do use Hostgator for my small sites that don't need watching.

[john_kennedy]

Not everyone lives near a datacenter nor has the know how to manage a server much less configure, install and maintain one.

As others have said, there is nothing that is 100%. Even in Sleaklight's situation, his server could go down and would remain so until someone fixed the issue.

You just have to accept the fact that the internet is not a perfect world and stuff happens.

John

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Originally Posted by Joeman

Home servers are never safe!
low speed connection

Not necessarily. And, if you have the income to support it, you can run some pretty high speed lines to your house.

domestic power suply

Battery backup.

chance of flooding, theft, fire

Data centers are immune to those risks? What about tornadoes? Earthquakes?

cup of coffee spilt

Don't drink coffee close to the servers.

mouse chewing through cables

Cat.

phone line dropping etc etc..

Don't host on dial-up.

There is no 100% safe way to host your contents, but dedicated server is far more secure than a home server.

Depends on how paranoid you are. A dedicated server is hosted at a data center with numerous other servers. If a terrorist (domestic or otherwise) wanted to cause some economic damage, a data center is a better target than trying to find someone's home server.

The security of a home server is really dependent upon how much effort you're willing to put into it. If you want to describe home servers as "never being safe" than the same description must apply to servers at web hosts and data centers as well. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

The optimal solution is to utilize multiple hosts located at different physical locations across the country or even around the world (as you suggested) and combine that with a capable home server. If one goes down, you're not completely down because other sites will still be running. If a server should go down permanently, you can just move your sites to one of the others. If your home is destroyed, you still have servers out there. If the data centers are destroyed, you still have your home server.

[JohnHuizinga]

Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert

Cat.

Cat chewing through cables.
Had it happen. With a home PC not a server.

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by JohnHuizinga

Cat chewing through cables.
Had it happen. With a home PC not a server.

No problem. Get a dog to eat the cat and get mousetraps instead.