Hi there,

Not sure if this will make sense. Can I have my website, the same identical website hosted by two web companies at the same time? So if one web host goes down, users are still able to access the website via the other web host. Is that possible?


Thanks,

E.

I think you should go for load balance hosting. So if one server goes down, the request is automatically routed to next server. You will need to put your website on both servers. Many webhosts providing load balancing servers, will automatically copy your files on all the balancing servers. This way the downtime is almost eliminated.

You can learn more about load balancing at http://www.web-hosting-world.com/loa...nce_server.php

Yeah load balance hosting is a good option.

John the link is really very good.

I think that this is not necaserry !
If you are with webhosting company that provides
uptime guarantee 99.9% !

Yeah, just set the alternative dns servers.. u have ns1 and ns2.. then you just add your backups.

Originally Posted by emrique007

Hi there,

Not sure if this will make sense. Can I have my website, the same identical website hosted by two web companies at the same time? So if one web host goes down, users are still able to access the website via the other web host. Is that possible?


Thanks,

E.

I just spoke with Powweb and they use clusters. several servers make a cluster. If one server goes down, the site gets redirected to another server. but if the cluster goes down then your site goes down as well. any other way to prvent any down time?

The other solution is hosting with two different hosts and setting up your domain name nameservers to point to each host (Set primary ns1 to host1 and secondary ns2 to host2) as mentioned by dk40k in the above post. This way all the requests to your domain will be send to host1. If host1 does not respond, the host2 will be queried.

In the above case, you need to have identical websites on both hosts servers. If you are using a database driven websites, you will need to write a program to automatically copy the data from one server to another.

Also check for a setup, which will rotate the requests to both the hosts. Again if you are choosing two hosts, choose hosts whose datacenters are located geographically two diffrent areas. This way if one area has a natural disaster and breaksdown, the other area will still be live.

Originally Posted by john551

The other solution is hosting with two different hosts and setting up your domain name nameservers to point to each host (Set primary ns1 to host1 and secondary ns2 to host2) as mentioned by dk40k in the above post. This way all the requests to your domain will be send to host1. If host1 does not respond, the host2 will be queried.

No, thats not correct. Setting different values for you domain's DNS will not "guarantee" that you will be redirected to the 2nd website if the 1st one is down. Instead, all it will do is to send the traffic randomly to any one of the two servers. So, 50% of the hits will go to one server and the other 50% will go to the other server. And, when the DNS sends the traffic to a server, it does NOT detect whether the destination server is online or not. So, if your 2nd server is down, and DNS sends your traffic to the 2nd server, your visitors will simply fail to see your site.

If you wish to achive this functionality using DNS, try using the "failover DNS" feature from UltraDNS.com. This will REALLY detect which server is running & will redirect accordingly. In this case, your mail domain will ALWAYS point to UltraDNS.com's DNS, and in your UltraDNS.com's account will be set based on what servers you wish to use during failover.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Thanks for the correction Chris.