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by stevekemp·13y ago·view on hn ↗
If you want to be 100% reliable that implies you need servers at more than one ISP/location. That way if a single one dies you're still up and running on the others.

Unfortunately that gets expensive because instead of having a single machine you suddenly need two/three/four/many.

Then you need to factor in the overhead of setting things up to work in a distributed fashion - database replication, load-balancing to route traffic, etc.

If you want to do things cheaply your best bet is to rent hosts at two locations, and have DNS handled at a third. Configure one host to be live, and leave the other one receiving constant dumps of html/db-content. In the event of the main ISP dying you switch DNS to the second - that gives you a migration time of ~5 minutes.

i.e. If budget is a concern have a hot-spare and use DNS records with very short TTL settings, so you can switch promptly.

1 comments
Thanks. I thought about this but DNS poses one problem, in Europe many ISPs overrides default TTL for up to 24 hours and caches the response. This means that even if I change the DNS record the ISP will serve stale responses to my customers and the problem will still be there. Therefore I can't rely on DNS unfortunately.