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Need Suggestions: Implementing FailOver Strategy For Our Company Website

by geekology
1 replies
This is to seek suggestions and ideas from members here on implementing fail over strategy for our company website.

We can't really afford to have downtime on the site which is hosted on VPS of DreamHost (DH). DH VPS though good gets down once in a while.

First thought that comes to anybodys mind is to move to another webhost but in our experience most of the webhosts though claim 99.9% uptime guarantee, no one is able to really provide that and dedicated servers would be an overkill for us - at least as of now.

So we think of implementing a DNS failover strategy. Here is what we plan to do.
  1. Mirror our files on another host (say hostgator) but keep mysql database on Dreamhost (In our experience mysql servers are really v stable on DH)
  2. Use a DNS service like zoneedit.com which will keep polling our main server(Dreamhost) for the uptime. In case, it is down it will point our A Name to hostgator (We will keep TTL to 2 mins)
  3. So files will be served from hostgator's server which will in turn point to mysql database on dreamhost.
  4. In the mean time zoneedit will keep on polling Dreamhost , as soon as it is up it will point A Name back to Dreamhost
Does this makes sense? Any ideas you would want to add?
#company #failover #implementing #strategy #suggestions #website
  • Profile picture of the author theIMgeek
    For third-party DNS hosting, I use and recommend DNS Made Easy

    They offer 2 failover settings on their business plan that will switch DNS within 5 minutes of any downtime.

    Now, DNS failover is not seamless by any means. The switch will occur within 5 minutes, but then each user's internet provider will have their own DNS cache that will refresh in who-knows-how-long. (not all of them stick to the TTL times you set) It could easily be 30 minutes before a person will see the fail-safe site.

    That said, your plan above still has all your MySQL eggs in one basket. That solution depends on what the site is and how often the database changes. You could sync/back-up the database to the failover server every N hours to keep a duplicate copy.

    The fail-over site could try to access the main MySQL server, and if that fails go to the back-up server, with something in place to handle any missing short-term data.

    Now this can get as technical as can be... but even a fail-over to a static "Please be patient" page with real-time news is a good start.

    -Ryan
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