server backup advice

AHarvey

AHarvey

AHarvey

Soldato
Joined
6 Mar 2008
Posts
10,079
Location
Stoke area
Hi all,

At work we have office and remote workers and we've some webspace that comes from a local company (we're an internet based company but for some reason they can't be bothered to set a little something aside for our department :( )

Now this company is a little unreliable, tonight for instance they've had NAS issues since 7pm and it's still not up, which for a 24 hour a day industry like ours isn't acceptable. However, I know I won't be allowed to tell them to do one and go elsewhere as its a friend of the manager!

What I would like to do is mirror the entire site (2 wikis, 1 forum, several pages, couple of sql dbases etc) on to a 000webhost free site (plenty big enough for us).

is there anyway of automating this? I don't want to have to make changes to each site every single day just in case we have downtime! :(
 
(Apologies if I sound patronising, I have no idea how much experience you have in any of this)

It all mainly depends on the platforms you are working with and what sort of access you have.

It wouldn't be all that hard to use rsync/ftp (or whatever file transfer methods your platforms support) regularly between your main host and backup. This could be automated and with some scripts could also backup the databases, shoot them over to the other server and then restore. The main issues are going to be failing over to the backup site nicely.

Say your main host goes down and you are informed immediately. Either you are going to have to tell all your customers to go to www.mybackupsite.com instead of www.myrealsite.com or you are going to have to update the DNS relating to that site. Both cases are unrealistic and at best could result in several hours further downtime.

Another way could be to round-robin the DNS records. For example, Mr Client goes to www.myrealsite.com. That domain name will be resolved into the IP address of one of your servers, distributed sequentially (consecutive requests will get the addresses like A,B,A,B etc). This doesn't stop Mr Client from seeing an error when one of the servers is down, but a refresh on the browser should then take him to the other site (not guaranteed).

This means you will need to maintain pretty much exact replicas of the site on both servers, with databases this could get quite ugly.

In short, there isn't a great way of doing it. You won't want to hear it but the best way to deal with this sort of issue is either getting a more reliable host and put up with 0.01% downtime, or paying a fair bit more for IP address failover and continuously replicated database servers.

Of course, someone may come up with a more graceful solution but it's my bed time :) Good luck!
 
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@iwasinnamuknow - just set the TTL on the www A record to 3 minutes or something, that negates dns issues.

Some companies offer fail over dns as a service out the box so will flick to the secondary server when the primary goes unresponsive. I think cloud floor DNS offers this.
 
The easiest solution would be to have your sites moved to tsohost/vidahost or someone where they have good uptime for the sake of £30/year.

Clearly do backup your data separately too though :).
 
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