Backup Webhosting How?

[printas]

Hello,

I currently host my ecommerce site with a webhosting that once in a while the server is down.

I like to know how to have a backup webhosting for our site so there will be no downtime where visitors can be automatically redirected to the backup webserver in a different webhost provider?

Please let me know is there also any script requirement I have to put on our main host so that it can automatically detect that the server is down and any visitors coming to that site should be directed to the server that is up?

Thank you.
Michael

[cyanide]

I currently host my ecommerce site with a webhosting that once in a while the server is down.
like now? lol

I like to know how to have a backup webhosting for our site so there will be no downtime where visitors can be automatically redirected to the backup webserver in a different webhost provider?

The only way to really do that is by using your current host, if they support some kind of load balancing or mirroring, which I'm sure they don't


Please let me know is there also any script requirement I have to put on our main host so that it can automatically detect that the server is down and any visitors coming to that site should be directed to the server that is up?
Sure, there are scripts that can do something like that. However, if your server is down, the scripts won't be read, so it won't do you any good.

How about moving to another host?
Just curious, but what are you paying...

I've run a couple tests of Ip addresses at the same datacentre as you, and they are fine.
My guess is that your host is charging ultra-cheap prices and over-loading the server to make up for it, causing it to crash on a regular basis

[edhan]

As said by cyanide, your choice will be opting another hosting company if you are encountering alot of downtime.

You may want to verify using the level3 site as whether it is really down or your ISP connection with the site is broken.

http://www.level3.com/LookingGlass/

Use the above link and key in your IP Address to do a traceroute to confirm if it is truly down.

Hope this helps.

Edward

[rackaid]

What you are looking for is failover. Load balancing and backups handle other issues.

There are many levels of fail-over ranging from application to server to network. From your description, I cannot pinpoint at which level your services are failing.

For true-failover, you will need a host that is capable of re-routing traffic to another datacenter, perferably in a different geographical location. A few hosts provide this but it is considerably more costly than having a single account. If you run shopping carts, forums or other such sites with dynamic data, you then have to consider how you will sync the two fail-over sytems before and after a service failure.

My recommendation is to first determine if it is your application, server or network that is failing.

If it is your application, then get the software authors to find the problem

If it is your server, then ask your provider to move/change your server.

If it is your provider's network, then change providers. Most providers should be able to provide at least 99.9% uptime at the network level. If not, then look elsewhere. A 99.9% may sound good but consider that it is still 8.5 hours. If that were to hit during business hours for a busy e-com site, then you've just lost a nice bit of revenue.

[printas]

Thanks everyone for the knowledgable help and suggestions. My webhost provider did confirm they were having a server failure before. Is not my connection with the ISP.

I pay about $7.00 a month on this webhosting and just moved to them about a week ago. So, I'm going to give them another try and see what happens. They did give us a reimbursement for the days the server was down. That's their 99.95 uptime guaranteed.

I'm going to ask them about the mirroring server. They said they have Premium service, but then if it is in the same server is bull.

If they have antoher server failure, I'm going to move out for sure.

[ehcraig]

Thanks everyone for the knowledgable help and suggestions. My webhost provider did confirm they were having a server failure before. Is not my connection with the ISP.

I pay about $7.00 a month on this webhosting and just moved to them about a week ago. So, I'm going to give them another try and see what happens. They did give us a reimbursement for the days the server was down. That's their 99.95 uptime guaranteed.

I'm going to ask them about the mirroring server. They said they have Premium service, but then if it is in the same server is bull.

If they have antoher server failure, I'm going to move out for sure.

I would suggest a mirrored-site. Find another hosting group that would do it for little to nothing.

Or as the others have suggested, get another hosting company. I have used a few over the years (10+) and have only had a 'single' downtime incident.

[n2links]

Since you're paying only $7.00 per month for you hosting, you're probably not looking for any of the expensive DNS services available. However, you might want to look at http://zoneedit.com. They've just added a Failover and Load Balancing service. You'd need to have a static IP on your current server and the backup server. This may be what you're looking for.

[Orion]

Another option I haven't heard yet is as follows:

Many Registrants or other third party companies offer DNS hosting.

If your DNS is remote then you can have primary i.e. ns1.mydomain.com pointing to the main server, ns2.mydomain.com points to totally different server hosting identical mirror

I have different servers hosting my site and my email accounts on one domain, using the remove dns services allows one to be out of commission and the other still works.

This does NOT help for load balancing which would require the remote DNS servers as well as a proxy service but then you're getting into big bucks.

Hope this helps!

[nowpulse]

You mentioned that your "eCommerce" site is down. If it is a shopping cart application with a database that requires users to register and login, then the DNS solution Orion mentions will be trickier.

Using DNS to point your site to multiple hosting accounts is ok for static sites, but could get confusing with data-driven applications. How do you keep the separate databases in synch? Will you have to process orders and check data on two separate systems instead of one? A good low-budget option would be rather than pointing the primary and secondary nameservers to different IP addresses, have them both point to the same host, and in an emergency switch them both to point to a failover host. Unless you're mirroring the database, there will probably be some data inconsistencies that you can fix when switching back to the main server. Cleaning the data is a pain, but better than losing sales when the site is down.

If your eCommerce site is strictly static HTML (no database) that points to a 3rd party eCommerce enabler like PayPal, then Orion's suggestion will work great.

Either way, make sure you setup monitoring to page you if a site is down so you can quickly make the DNS changes and minimize the downtime. Having automated DNS failover is even better.

The best bet for great uptime is going with a reliable hosting service that provides redundant internet backbone connections and backup power supplies. Check if they provide a guaranteed uptime of over 99.9%.

[ADAM Web Design]

I'd agree with most of what nowpulse said. One good host will be less expensive, more reliable, and less problematic than two mirrored ones.

The only part I disagree with is the 99.9% uptime part. That's a bit too unrealistic for any host to expect. Let's take a typical 30-day month and see what 99.9% uptime means in terms of downtime:

In a typical 30-day month, there are 720 hours. To be up 99.9% of the time means that the site would have to be up approx. 719 hours, 16 minutes. Now, most of the time, that's not going to be a problem; but the fact of the matter still remains that hosting is still done on computers, which do break from time to time. They need to be rebooted, hard drives fail, programs crash, whatever.

I feel a host should be entitled to a little more slack in terms of diagnosing, isolating and solving these types of issues. As someone who has some experience maintaining computer networks (albeit minimal experience with a server), I can tell you first-hand that it isn't easy. Sometimes there are a myriad of possibilities as to why something's going wrong, and the only way to isolate and resolve the specific issue is good ol' trial and error. And that takes time. 44 minutes just isn't enough for some issues, and that really is something we as customers need to consider more often. Hosts are companies too, just like we are, and they've got just as much right to make an honest buck if they're straight up about it.

Personally, I've always felt a 99.5% guarantee allows hosts enough time to calmly and rationally fix one or more problems (up to 3 hours, 36 minutes in any given month) and that the hosts who offer this guarantee are more stable than those who offer a 99.9% or "conditional" 100$ guarantee (*cough*CIHost*Cough*).

Here's something else to consider when dealing with a host: do they show you that they appreciate your business when they work with you, or do they just try to upsell you or brush you off when something goes wrong? There are hosts out there that do actually give a damn about their customers and treat them with dignity and respect. If you're not sure where they are, ask on the board. I'm sure all of us have one or two hosts that we would absolutely swear by as far as not only the service itself, but the people behind the servers. I know I do.

[DrTandem1]

The simple answer to having a script to do this is "no." This is because your domain name is assigned an IP address to your server. Yes, there can be redundancy with the host having multiple servers, but if their redundancy fails, you're out of luck.

You would need your script loaded on every router across the internet to accomplish total redundancy. That's why it can take up to 48 hours for a new domain name to populate through out the internet.

[jcopley]

You don't say how often 'once in a while' is, but by almost any definition, a server that goes down once in a while, goes down way too often.

I have hosted commerce sites for seven years, and I don't remotely consider my services to have high availability. Yet, our total downtime in all those years amounts to a few days. And, I don't consider our record exceptional.

Also, from my perspective, $7.00 per month for a commerce site is absurdly small. Think about it -- they lose money on you if they so much as answer your email.

At these rates, an uptime guarantee is worthless. Let's say your server goes down for a week. You'll get back, what -- $1.75?

If you are worried enough about downtime to be considering failover options, you need another web host.

Regards,

Joe

[mawells]

We've started recommending mirror sites to any of our clients that are serious about Internet sales. We have them get 2 domain names and place identical sites at 2 different servers in 2 different geographical locations.(After all, there's tornados, hurricanes, power outages, earthquakes to consider.)

Anyway, we then tell them to make sure that they promote both sites - either offline or online so that the traffic between the two sites are as close to 50/50 as they can get. Then, if one site goes down, we go into their Network Solutions account and point the down domain to the live domain (just a domain forwarding - we don't change the DNS).

Once the down site comes back up, we direct it back again. This means that, while Network Solutions is redirecting the down domain name, which takes about 24 hours, that the client only loses 1/2 of their site traffic.

We also have site monitoring setup for them so that they are alerted if one of the sites should go down. (We use Internet Seer for this.)

One thing to note is that, if the site server is down, it does not mean that the shopping cart server is down - just that no one can get to it. Also, your site may not be down at all, but the nameserver at the hosting company may have crashed - again no one can get to your site. In any case, it's good to have a backup plan.

[compusolver]

Any change to DNS pointers will take roughly twenty-four hours to activate and twice that before all points are redirected, way too long to be down.

The fact that you've been having this difficulty indicates that you are not with a good hosting service. Not surprising, since there are many more "bad" hosting services than "good" ones.

You CAN (and should) expect good hosting in the seven to ten dollar a month price range, if you are not on a Windows server.

I was constantly having hosting problems and moving clients once or twice a year until I got into the business myself, for self-preservation.

My advice? Get off that server right away. Any server that interrupts your sites for more than several minutes at a time or more than once or twice a month is a bad one.

You don't need expensive redundant sites, programs to verify your site is up, etc. You just need a decent hosting service.

Try to get some recommendations from people online here (be sure they aren't in the hosting business!)

Good luck!

[compusolver]

Adam, Adam ... I STRONGLY DISAGREE!!

As usual, I'd posted (above) before reading all previous posts. After reading Adam's (AdamWebDesign) I couldn't wait to post a reply, but guess what? The WebProWorld forum server went down! Thankfully, it was down about eight minutes and not the three hours and some that Adam says he wouldn't mind if his server was down.

Now maybe, unlike most of us, Adam has a "Life" and doesn't live and breathe by the computer. But I have clients who would hire hit men if our server was down half an hour!

A "real" hosting company has hot-swappable drives. They can pull a harddrive out of a malfunctioning server and slap it into another. And they can do it in less than three hours! ;)

When I owned computer stores, I had technicians who could build (from scratch) and setup a computer in twenty minutes. There is no excuse for a server to be down three hours a year let alone three hours a month on average.

Now Adam knows his stuff and I usually agree with him, but I suspect his photo was taken during one of those three hour "down" sessions! :)

[mawells]

Wow, Compusolver! You're tough. I currently use 3 different hosting companies - all seem to have some "downtime" (although the latest one seems to be the most stable).

Let me count the horror stories: one site down 2 full weeks, 3 sites down 2 days this past March, 3 more sites down 1 day this past April (I'm trying to get rid of this hosting company, but I have a lot of sites with them - they used to be great and then Affinity Internet bought them.), I still have one client who can't retrieve orders from her shopping cart (it's been a month now - of course we switched all of her shopping code to her mirror site.) and don't even get me started with Email. These problems are primarily from this one hosting company where I pay anywhere from $14.95 to $24.95/month for their service PLUS a $10/month ODBC driver fee.

The other two hosting companies respond very quickly to problems.

No matter - as I said, there are always going to be mittigating circumstances - earthquakes, fire, flood that could bring down any hosting company. I do know of one company that went out of business because of flooding in Texas - that was a few years ago.

[USALUG]

I'll just refer to that age old saying

"You get what you pay for."

;) Find a better host.

[mawells]

Actually, I think you missed the point. Of the 3 hosting companies that I'm using, it's the MOST EXPENSIVE one that's crashing all the time.

But my real point was, that any business needs to have a sort of 'business insurance' against power outages, fire, flood, etc. Why wouldn't your web site be any different?

[Orion]

I totally agree with compusolver a few mins here and there is fine, network upgrades and the like but if there's a problem with your server they should just hotswap the drive so your downtime isn't more than about 30mins.

The only exception would be network issues outside of your datacenter. In the last few months we've had issues with some of our west coast clients unable to see their sites on our servers. After thorough investigation it turned out that they were all with ISPs that used services via the Shaw network and that the Shaw network (a major back bone provider) was having major problems.

I've found a lot of clients will mistake network problems like that for downtime on their server when their site is fine and online to the rest of the world.

nowpulse, thank you very very good point the e-commerce sites would have a problem for sure. I'll have to figure something out on that one lol. Ultimately the proxy server is the way to go with mirrored servers sharing data and load balancing etc. they handle the database issues too (no clue technically how it's done sorry).

Hey, if anyone currently uses a proxy service that they are satisfied with I'd love some input!

Another nice thing to have is Hardware Raid 5 we run it on several of our servers so that the drives are mirrors for load balancing and redundancy within the server itself.

Great topic!

[USALUG]

Actually, I think you missed the point. Of the 3 hosting companies that I'm using, it's the MOST EXPENSIVE one that's crashing all the time.

But my real point was, that any business needs to have a sort of 'business insurance' against power outages, fire, flood, etc. Why wouldn't your web site be any different?

My sites are a bit different because it's usually ME that's running the webservers :) Plus, my sites are not ecommerce based..... which is probably the biggest difference.

I have backups....and can set up a new system in less than an hour to replace a bad drive. But my main site... www.usalug.org has had uptime of over 112 days.. it's not hosted by me, but by a dedicated server off site. I run the server and the backups with cron jobs using rsync.... I don't have mirror sites as of yet, because I don't feel the need for it yet, as my site isn't really big enough to warrant that. Simple backups work fine, just having a good webhost will solve the downtime issues. When you start talking mirrors/raid backups/ and more elaborate systems..... your over that $7 month budget.

Hence... you get what you pay for.

usalug.org runs on a dedicated server..and gets 700GB bandwidth per month and 160 GB of hard drive space comprising of two 80 gb drives one of which i could set up as a backup drive.... but all my data is backed up several times a day with cron jobs.... via rysnc. I also have the capability to change the IP addresses to a new machine in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. All of this costs of course... about $120 per month.

So... from $7 per month to $120 per month... if your generating several thousand dollars per month from an ecommerce site...... YOUR CRAZY if your using a $7 month webhost... well..... at least in my opinion. You'd be better off hosting it yourself on a dsl line if your having too much down time, the cost is minimal, and it isn't NEARLY as hard as some would lead you to believe :) Just depends on how big your business is and how much money you want to spend.

Finding a very reliable webhost should eliminate the bulk of downtime.... performing simple backups should be all the insurance you need normally.

[mawells]

AAAAH! I see the difference - Linux. We're an Internet marketing company with nearly 50 accounts spread over these 3 hosting companies (it used to be 2 but we're slowly migrating away from that problem one). All of our hosting service is Windows because we run Cold Fusion, Access Databases and we need to have Deepmetrix LiveStats (we're a marketing company, we can't live without our stats).

(We have more than 50 accounts for Internet marketing, we just host about 50 sites through our reseller programs.)

I don't know anything about the technical side of running a web server. I only know that the hosting company that has been having problems has been having them for the past 6 months or so where the problems have become "extreme." Not all problems have to do with a site being up - although that's the major one. We need our stats, my clients need to be able to retrieve their shopping cart orders. So, since we don't have our own machines and don't want them, we have been recommending mirror sites at two different hosting companies and it's really not that expensive. Most of our clients can have two sites hosted (with Cold Fusion and a shopping cart) for about $450/year. Since our clients are real businesses willing to spend thousands on marketing their web site, this is no big deal to them. Having a site down, however, is a very big deal.

[mawells]

Oh, I should have explained - most of our clients get anywhere from 1200 - 10,000 visitors per month to their sites (they're mostly industrial accounts). So we're not talking amazon.com, here.

I agree, that a robust, active shopping site needs a dedicated server. Many of the 50 that we host don't pay any attention to their site at all unless they hear that it's down.

[DrTandem1]

Regarding reliabilty, ISPs such as SBC target a goal they call "five-nines." In other words 99.999% up-time. To these profesional ISPs, 99.9% is woefully inadequate. I would hope that a web host would at least deliver four-nines or 99.99%.

[intelliot]

At these rates, an uptime guarantee is worthless. Let's say your server goes down for a week. You'll get back, what -- $1.75?
Depends on the host. With many I know, if they don't meet 99.9% uptime (or whatever their guarantee is), they give you the whole month - meaning, if they were down for a week you'd get back $7. And many apologies, of course...

[mawells]

Consider, however, that sometimes it's not the hosting company that goes down, but part of the "grid." We did have one hosting company down for a day because a fiberoptic backbone was severed - not the hosting companies' equipment or responsibility. Another time a router was down. *$@! happens.

Thus, I reiterate, a backup site is important if you're serious about having your Web site as an integral part of your sales strategy. And that site should be located in a different geographical region.