dmorison - 4:01 pm on Mar 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

My setup is very similar to explorador's.

2 servers, different hosting companies, different continents! Both have capacity to spare, although as traffic increases i'm spending more time making sure they can cope - hence my recent thread about considering cloud hosting.

Anyway...

I flattened both servers to a clean OS install, and manage an identical configuration on both - latest versions of Apache / PHP / MySQL etc. and all the modules I need, and they both run an identical Apache configuration, with all sites configured - just not necessarily serving all of them.

Each night, they do a "mutual backup" of data, running mysqldump on the live databases and FTP'ing the gzipped output across to a holding directory on the other server.

All domains are managed with another separate company, so in the event of one of my hosts becoming recessionated I can switch DNS over to the other server and after a few SQL imports here and there it's ready to take over.

Or at least that's the theory.

Currently, site development is a bit adhoc, but I'm working on streamlining that with just this scenario in mind. What i'm setting up is a local development server that will run yet another identical configuration to my 2 live servers. Once i'm happy with the changes, I just want to hit one script to rsync (or something like that) the changes to both live servers at once.

Once my local dev machine is in place then theoretically if both servers went offline I could serve everything off my ADSL! But let's hope the recession isn't that bad, eh?!