No Power in LA - my hosting provider's in LA

What do you do for redundancy?

[bnhall]

Well, I found out that the power's out in LA when I noticed my server was down. I have a dedicated hosting set up in LA (I'm in Texas), but now I'm thinking I need a 2nd emergency provider for events like this.

What do the rest of you do? Take the hit and deal with it? Do you have multiple hosting providers?

[larryhatch]

Hello bnhall:

I just have one host ISP, in SE Texas. No problemo there so far.

My Registrar (large former monopoly) allows two hosts, the second as a backup.
No extra charge for that, but I would have to pay double for second hosting,
and its just not worth it for a non-commercial site.

If I depended on site site income, I would consider a second host cheap insurance.
Some of them are like $5-6 per month with good uptime.

The hassle would put me off in my special case.
I make small changes to several pages every day. I don't fancy doing that twice a day. -Larry

[Corey Bryant]

We also have our DC in downtown LA and they had no problems. (I live about 5 blocks west of the perimeter of the outage.)

You should find a DC that has a UPS system. There is no reason why a good DC would not have at least an UPS system.

-Corey

[bnhall]

My DC, MediaTemple, says they're online with backup generators and all but their upstream providers are down.

[martinibuster]

I just noticed that someone's website I know is down, but their host provider's website isn't. lol

bummer.

They're based in Santa Monica, one of those gigantic web hosts with thousands of sites on each server.

[larryhatch]

The power outage is mostly over in Los Angeles.
Places affected were within LA mostly, or dependent on the LA municipal power district.

Santa Monica is on the So. Calif. Edison system which was not affected.
Parts of Santa Monica (city buildings etc.) use solar power during the day. - Larry

[martinibuster]

Well, they're down, and so is everyone else on the same server.

[JKMitchell]

I use two servers in different parts of the country (UK) using different hosts, with DNS round robin from multiple name servers (both here and in the US) for the important websites.

Rsync takes care of the updates - I only ever update one copy and the rsync process runs on a regular basis to update the 2nd copy. These are both Linux servers so I don't know about Windows options.

Each server also has a copy of any databases on.

Even so, it's not perfect but for the cost it's adequate.

[iblaine]

The quality of redunancy depends on how much money you want to spend. For a premium price you can host at companies like Exodus(now Savvis), have earthquake proof buildings, backups and everything else you can ever want. Or you can go the cheap route, replicate your site over different hosting providers and round robin your DNS. If you need load balancing and have a dedicated DB then that will lend you to more pricey solutions. For the right price you can get anything. Hosting companies exist in central america that come with armed guards and bomb proof shelters.

[martinibuster]

>>> Hosting companies exist in central america that come with armed guards and bomb proof shelters.

Hehe. In Central America, even Pizza Hut has armed guards.

I never thought about servers being located down there. I imagine they must really really need backup for when electricity goes down.