2 Servers 2 Different Companies - web-hosting

Had major hosting company (HG) go down today, all servers,vps, hosting etc for 6hrs.
Question: I want to have two VPS machines. One with company A, And one with company B.
I want to keep one website up using both vps machines with 2 different companies (different locations)..How do I set this up so if one goes down while the other "seamlessly" keeps the site running?
There was another question similar to this on stackoverflow but was not really answered.
Can a website be hosted on 2 servers? Best answer so far was -1
Any other solutions?

DNS failover should do what you want. If you use reasonable short TTL for your CNAME or A/AAAA records.
You have to design the failover scenario:
* how the primary site failure is detected
* how the state of the web app is transfered to the backup location
* how DNS records are changed
* how is the system restored back to primary site

Related

Selecting hosting provider and service for site like KhanAcademy

I'm having difficulties with selecting a host for a website that I'm working on and would appreciate some sincere tips. There are a lot of articles on the topics, many of which are biased, which is why I'm quite confused.
I need help selecting a specific host and service. I have the following requirements and would like a few different suggestions. Ideally, I want one suggestion on a specific service with Cloudflare since that's my primary choice even though I find their offering confusing. I also would like one suggestion with a provider that accepts BTCs as payment.
Now to my requirements:
The website is quite similar to KhanAcademy and Udemy. We want to host about 75 GB of videos that users should be able to view directly on the site (stream) with our own mediaplayer.
We also have about 15 GB of audios that users should be play directly on the site and download.
We do NOT want to use YouTube, Soundcloud or similar services.
Finally, we have an additional 25 GB of files that we need to host, and that users should be able to download.
The media should load quickly but since the site is new, we have no idea of bandwidth requirement. However, we expect that they will be slow at first but grow steadily over time.
We want the hosting service to come with SSL.
And we want a three-year subscription with a fixed upfront fee rather than monthly payments
Although this isn't a must, but we would prefer if we could use the same hosting service for two separate websites with different domains.

Joomla 1.5 site keeps getting blocked by host

I have a Joomla 1.5.26 site which I have had since Aug 2012. It has been in a stable condition since Aug, with no changes to components etc. It is firewalled with RS Firewall and all the other security precautions have been taken.
During the past few weeks the site has started to be blocked by the hosting company that holds the site, who claim that there are too many active connections. I have hunted through the sites, disabled various components etc and am still getting the same problems.
Has anyone experienced any similar issues? I am thinking of moving the site to a more reputable host for Joomla sites to see if it is more robust elsehwere. I just can't undertand why this keeps happening. The Hosts, are placing the IP address of any machines we use to administer the site if the connections get too many, and then we are locked out for about fifteen minutes. As I said previously, nothing has changed on the site, and I cannot find any evidence of the files or database being hacked.
Any ideas?
Much appreciated
James
If your host is telling you that there have been too many connection then it will most likely mean 1 of the following 3:
You site has reached the maximum monthly bandwidth allowance
Your site has too much traffic for your current host and might need to be moved to a VPS server or something more powerful
You host is plain crap
Check to if you have reached your maximum monthly bandwidth allowance (if you have one) else I would probably recommend transferring to a different host, if you site isn't an extremely popular site, generating thousands of users a day.

Would VPS be enough for me?

I have 3 ASP.NET web sites and 3 Ruby on Rails ones. I'm planning them to be hosted on a VPS hosting. Suppouse each of them would have the attendance of 1 thousand people per day.
Now I'm hesitating about the VPS hosting. Can I host them (ASP.NET web sites and 3 Ruby on Rails ones) side by side? Or should I use and buy 2 different hosting: first one is for ASP.NET web sites and second one for RoR web sites?
How much power of VPS do I choose to host them? And how much does it cost approximately?
I'm planning to pay not more than 25$ per month. If I use heroku and appharbor would they host all of them (3 and 3) and how much would it cost?
I think with that money you can have 2 Amazon EC2 instances, and should be fine to run those apps, plus you can have one for free for the first year.
But with heroku and appharbor maybe you can have it almost for free. Both (not sure about appharbor) gives you 1 instance free for each app, and so that should be just fine for your apps. You should just have to pay for DB, if you need to, and other add-ons that in EC2 you can have for free, but will spend some memory.
So you must put everything on the table about your apps since PaaS are not normal hosting, the cost depends on what your app needs. So you bust see if your app needs caching service, DB size and wich one, background process? ...
I strongly believe that 1 VPS instance should be sufficient for handling 5 to 6 websites with 1000 visitors a day on each. Regarding the power, 1 GB RAM or 2 GB RAM windows VPS should be sufficient for these sites.
I know Windows VPS can handle ASP.Net websites, but I am not sure about Ruby on Rails.
I have never heard about "heroku and appharbor", so, no suggestions for them.

Running multiple websites (with different hostnames) on AppHarbor?

Do I need to have separate/multiple workers to run multiple websites (each with a unique domain) on AppHarbor? I'm using a VPS now to run 5 different websites and it's very cost effective, but thinking about moving to something like AppHarbor or Azure.
Thanks.
From the one account (username/pass), you would set up each site with it's own free Canoe plan.
To each plan you would then need to add the $10/m for custom hostnames, which lets you point your domain name at the site. For a total of $50/m
https://appharbor.com/pricing
Multiple workers (the paid plans) are designed to scale one site to handle more traffic, not to host multiple sites under the one plan.

Enough bandwidth to support

I have a client that is paying $1500 per month for hosting of 1 website (1 domain name, email is hosted elsewhere). The website is pretty low traffic. Like, 100 unique visitors a week. The only catch (and why it is so expensive) is that their database is 15 GB, and is replicated from the hosting company to inside my small companies office.
Inside the office, there is a desktop application that hits the internal database quite a bit. From the website, some data is entered into THAT version of the database. Replication keeps both databases in synch on a schedule of every 5 minutes.
My client has a T1 that runs into their office. I want to knock out the hosting provider altogether, host their website from a server they already have (more than capable of handling this website), and dump the replication altogether. This would save them $1500 per month, and for a company of 5, it would really make a difference to them.
Assuming I already have a backup strategy in place (way to move a copy of the DB offsite every day), what are the problems with this?
Support? they can reboot their server as easily as the hosting provider can.
What if server goes down for good? There is a duplicate that I can bring up in a couple of hours, and that is all the level of service they really require.
What am I missing here? I want to save them money, but I don't want to screw them over...
EDIT: Some of the answers and comments make it clear that I myself wasn't clear. My client (company A, not a hosting provider) is paying company B to host their website. The website has a database (MS SQL Server 2000) that is 15 GB. That SQL Server DB is being replicated back to a server # company A.
Company B is charging Company A $1500 per month for this service.
Company A already has a T1 for connectivity to the internet. They are located inside of a run of the mill business park.
I am proposing doing away with any outside hosting, getting a DNS provider to point the website to Company A's static IP and hosting the website on a server inside Company A. Then there would be no need for any replication at all, and they wouldn't be paying company B $1500 per month.
I hope that explains it. I'm going to re-read and comment on all the current answers.
Really, any advice is very appreciated.
Sounds to me like your only risk in moving the server in-house is if your T1 goes down. If you have a backup strategy in place for that, go for it.
The other option is to co-loc your own server with your own SQL Server licence on it. Hosting companies charge a lot for hosting SQL Server databases because they have to pay per-CPU licencing for it. So they build up a powerful server to serve lots of client's databases, but then SQL Server offers no way to do useage accounting so they only way they can bill/screw you is on database size.
Sounds like the traffic is low enough on your site you can get a dual core server, a 1 CPU licence of SQL Server for a one-off cost of a few thousand dollars and then you're only paying the monthly co-loc price.
A hosting provider can monitor the server 24x7. What if the server crashes at 8 pm? I the people at the small company are not working around the clock?
Depends on the service this DB is providing. What are the requirements to its uptime?
Database replication isn;t that expensive for bandwidth - well, assuming you're not doing a hotcopy of the entire DB files across the link that is.
Check out log shipping, or any of the supported replication options that will replicate the DB using minimal bandwidth. (you never said what the DB was, so I can't comment further there)
I would move to the new server and keep replication. At the very least, if you're really worried about data loss, then get another server in the same facility and copy across to that one - even if you copy 15Gb every 5 minutes, it'll be using non-chargeable bandwidth without even going outside the switch they're connected to.

Resources