Looking for a Failover Solution

What's your contingency plan?

[Vec_One]

A number of our sites were hosted by a local company for years. The tech support was not great, so when we established some important new sites we tried another company. Company #2 is even worse. This year, we have had several long periods of down time.

We have two related sites, as well as a secure site we use for ecommerce. They are all cross-linked. They are all hosted by the same company but on different shared servers.

I would like to have a failover solution that will provide two things:
1. Something besides an error message for human visitors.
2. Something that would prevent spiders from declaring our sites defunct.

Any sage advice from anyone?

[DaveAtIFG]

I would like to have a failover solution

So would everyone else! ;) Your situation brings up several issues. Let's assume for a moment that your two sites are hosted exclusively (not shared) and on separate hardware boxes.

In order for one to fail over to the other, each box will need to be aware of what the other is doing. They will need to exchange "I'm still alive!" messages periodically, so we'll need some software on each, to send them and to monitor them.

If each box has a unique IP, then some hardware will probably be needed to reroute traffic from one to the other in the event of a failure. If they share an IP, the non-failed box will need to somehow notify the upstream router to reroute. Off the shelf hardware and software probably exists to do all of this, it's probably available to and commonly used by hosting companies.

But if we add the complication of shared hosting, it becomes nearly impossible to implement a failover. A hosting company could offer a "redundant shared hosting package" at a premium price and perhaps some do, but shared hosting generally targets budget conscious customers.

This failover issue has been discussed occasionally over the years and I still haven't seen a definitive or satifactory answer. We have a few members that are involved with pro hosting and hopefully some will offer their insights.