Home hosting on dual ADSL links

Could you share some advice or experience

[yuri_d]

Hello to everyone!
I apologise for not being very technical in this particular area so I really need your advice.
My website has grown out of shared host and needs a good home at minimum cost.
It seems an attractive idea to put the server at home and load-balance/failover with a dual-wan router(e.g edimax 6624).
However some issues seem to be prohibitive to the idea.
1. Round robin dns will be cashed and if one link is down - many clients cashing this path will see a blank page.
2. SSL may not work because I read somewhere that SSL session caches the IP address and alternating packets from different links will break the SSL session.

Is this idea really impossible and what is the best way to say good-buy to a shared hosting?

[LifeinAsia]

what is the best way to say good-buy to a shared hosting?

Dedicated hosting. For not a whole lot more money, you get someone else to worry about all the niggling details 24/7, like DNS, multiple redundant Internet backbone connections, electricty, air conditioning, fire suppression, restricted physical access, firewalls, system monitoring, etc.

Unless you have your own 24/7 technical staff (or you don't need to be up 24/7) with a secure/stable data center, outsource it.

[Automaton]

Look into true load balancing. With a load balancer, the load balancer itself haas a single virtual IP for your pair of web servers. The load balancer can also handle SSL for the virtual IP.

[yuri_d]

Automaton,
Thank you for pointing me in that direction.
Is it set up on ISP side with 2 ADSL's from the same ISP?
Or is it a third party that handles DNS and provides address translation, and then i could use a regular load balacing router with 2 different ISP's?

[Automaton]

Well it works like this.

www.domain.com has a DNS entry pointing to an IP address.

A load balancer (either software or hardware appliance) is listening on port 80 on that IP address.

The load balancer has been configured with a list of server private IP addresses associated with that public IP address.

The load balancer forwards connections to the private IP addresses of your web servers based on round robbin, least connections, or other methods that you choose.

So you could set up your own load balancing, or your web host may offer the service.

[Automaton]

Oh, and it does not require 2 ISP's or 2 internet connections.

[sja65]

I think what you want and what you are going to get are two different things.

What you want is BGP (border gateway protocol). To set this up, you need to get an AS (autonomous system) number from ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers), get your upstream service providors to set up your AS number in their BGP tables, and then configure a router on your end. When this is set up, you will end up with ip addresses from both isp connections that can be reached through either connection. If either connection fails, traffic is automagically routed to the other connection. This is usually done on bigger connections than adsl, and since you need to get your ISPs involved, it may be impossible on your adsl connections.

What you will probably get is DNS failover. What you will do is get an ip from each isp, and set up your webserver to answer to either ip. You will also want to set up your DNS with a short TTL (time to live) and both isps ip addresses in round robin. When you have an outage from one of your isps, you will drop the downed isp ip address from dns. A few minutes later (depending on your TTL) almost everyone will be using the good isp. The only real downside to this is that some cacheing dns servers ignore the TTL (I know AOL used to do this), so if they have your bad isp ip address cached, you are out of luck for their users.

[yuri_d]

Thank you for your very good explanation. Your post is worth weeks spent on my own research.
BGP is obviously beyong the scope of my project, and the faiing over cashed DNS records is not the best option either. So be it dedicated then.
Thank you everyone who replied!