Answers to: Best practices for geo-redundancy?

Answer by rfelsburg

rfelsburg — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:30:32 -0400

I would recommend looking into Linux-HA, and heartbeat and pacemaker.

I use them for high availability failovers between servers.

Answer by Jeffery 1

Jeffery 1 — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:58:42 -0400

As a followup to some of these "why bother" / "paranoia" comments:

We have experienced four outages in the last month within our current datacenter (naming no names, but they are a huge organization in Dallas) which is why we're looking to add redundancy.

Each time our services go down we lose a significant amount of money as our advertising partners (Google, etc) are bringing visitors for which we pay, but who can't see our site to convert to sales. While some advertising partners such as Adwords can be "paused" in a short space of time during an outage, not all of them can. Working with small margins at high volume as we are, any extended outage can be very expensive.

Although the datacenter claims 100% uptime, things can still happen, as we saw last month.

The amount we lost due to the outages so far last month, was far LESS than the cost of a redundant setup in another facility would have been.

-J

Answer by nanodiamond

nanodiamond — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:34:23 -0400

Paranoia => greater cost than benefit obtained. Sounds like a Fed job.

Answer by jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:45:44 -0400

Possibly not the answer you're looking for, but have you done a cost benefit analysis to ascertain the true impact of an outage and then compared that with the costs of the kind of redundancy you're talking about? Have you taken into account the added complexity the above setup adds and ensured it won't cause more downtime then the issue you're trying to avoid? True real-time live geographically redundant infrastructure can be extremely complex and in many cases is overkill. A good backup schedule and properly planned disaster recovery plan can often mitigate a datacenter outage (by failing over to your backup datacenter) to just a couple of minutes, while avoiding a lot of the complexity. FWIW, the fact that you're currently running on a VPS was the first indication that what you're looking to do is almost certainly overkill, but I could be wrong.

--jeremy