explorador - 3:11 pm on Aug 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hi Webmasters, how would you make your sites stay online most of the time? I'm close to release my kind-of-cloud-solution and there isn't much we as webmasters can solve in terms of uptime. I took the time to think about it: local vs cloud solutions. There are a lot of benefits for certain apps to stay on the server instead of in one computer, and depending on the niche it might be by far the best choice.

What I've been doing to stay online:

• Hosted on a company that offers *failsafe hosting* (they have specific name for it, lets just keep it that way, *FH*). So far pretty happy with this.
  
• *FH* means whatever kind of redundancy for load, data, backup and connection, so if something goes down we would never notice it, but in true life that is never the case, the server goes down from time to time for whatever reason. Again, so far the uptime has been great but in more than 5 years with this company I faced dark days with no access. Things fail, no problem with that, just trying to minimize.
  
• I have two servers there, the more important sites are up to date on a backup server. Another backup goes to a third server outside this company.
  
• Having the same DNS, if something goes down for too long I just tweak the internal stuff to redirect everything to the other server. *This needs some basical access to the primary server*. I don't need to login into the registrars to modify DNS on each domain (some are on the client side, not mine). Is very important to me not to ask the clients to modify their DNS on their panels.
  
• If I can't access the primary server I can ask the staff to do the redirecting to the secondary server.
  
• If things turn ugly I use the backup data of any of the servers (2nd or 3rd) to bring the sites back again, I could do it on the 3rd server itself or a new server if needed.