First off apologies if this is posted in wrong place but I thought it was as good as any place to start

Hi everyone,

Until last weekend I had not thought about redundant server, backup server, failover, clustering - but guess who had one old box on floor 1 and a new box that I was migrating to on the 2nd floor - correct me! Fortunately I had offline backup of the sites but as it turned out the boxes were intact with no data loss

So I have come to the conclusion that I need some sort of redundancy/failover provision

Whilst I do not have an unlimited budget I am prepared to go for a 2 server setup if needs be as this has impacted on my profits sufficiently to warrant it

Presently my box is used only for my sites some of which are just static page sites and others making use of databases as well. On my new box I am using cPanel

I am not selling hosting services at the present time and have no immediate plans to do so

I could do with some good suggestions on the way forward

From what I have gleaned from the various forums, if I understand it correctly load balancing would provide me with a failover situation so if server A went down server B would kick in?

Also if I have read correctly the servers could be in different data centers?

Looking at the WHM cPanel if I set up clustering am I correct in thinking that the master would upadate pages on the slave? likewise would it update database entries? - could the WHM clustering be used for boxes in different DC's

If you think that load balancing is overkill and have any other suggestions please feel free to comment

At the end of the day I need to have some set up whereby if one DC's power supply gets fried or some other problem I can be up and running on another box in the shortest possible time

All comments suggestions as the best way to achieve this would be very much appreciated

Thanks Mel

Hello,

Just get two servers in two different centers (such as H2/Dallas) and then get dnsmadeeasy.com/ultradns.com and setup IP Anycast (basically failover) which will mean in the event server 1 fails, it will instantly (within a couple minutes) switch over to server 2.

This is by far the cheapest way to achieve redundancy (through dnsmadeeasy.com). Many of the top websites use ultradns.com.

Hi thanks for your reply

Have been looking at dnsmadeeasy and came away confused my excuse being it's been a rather stressful week

With dnsmadeeasy what I could not get my head around is do I have to have a failover dns for every website that is on the redundant server or is it just the one I require for the server

Mel

Hello,

That part I too am confused about too as I have many domains. I'm guessing if you only want failover for one website then it is no problem, but I really have no clue. If I learn more about this I'll let you know. I found an offer from a company on google (not going to post the name here) that offers a backup server with every purchase of a single server for a small fee and free load balancing configuration which I may check out too. Not sure if its the same as failover though.

I only started looking at redundancy options after my server in H1 was offline for days. I sent in a question to dnsmadeeasy yesterday and waiting back for a response. I suggest you shoot them an email too