Backup/Mirror Site

[jen24815]

I have a problem:

I have a web hosting company that I'm very happy with. Occasionally (not frequently) they are down for a short period of time.

While this certainly doesn't happen often, is there a way for me to have a backup hosting company that my site can "transfer" to in the event my primary hosting company is down for any reason?

I have secondary nameservers (in addition to my primary and secondary nameserver w/ my hosting co.) hosted on different backbones (or whatever the correct term is), but I'm talking about the entire site being accessible in the event the primary hosting companies servers go down.

And, will I be penalized in the S.E.s for doing so?

Thanks!

Jenny

[bcc1234]

Get another hosting account somewhere else and set zone ttl to something like 5 minues. If the primary host goes down - switch the zone records.

It won't help with googlebot though (don't know about other spiders).

[sem4u]

I would look for another webhost! If your server goes down when a search engine is spidering you could fall out of the database for a month.

However, no web host is 100% reliable. It may be worthwhile moving to a dedicated server where only your site(s) are hosted. On shared hosting if there are problems with other sites (and you never know who you are sharing a server with) the whole server can go down for a short time.

sem4u.

[jen24815]

Well, I'm very happy w/ the hosting company - this was beyond their control (a construction accident severed lines).

What I really am looking for is, a way to have a complete backup site - or is that even possible? Something that would switch over automatically in the event of a problem w/ the primary host.

[txbakers]

What you want is a constant mirror site that people can find without changing domain names.

There is a way to do this, it's expensive, and I don't know how.

I would like to learn how as well.

[DaveAtIFG]

Recent discussions here [webmasterworld.com] should provide some insight.