Methods to keep a website alive and kicking

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Posted by vitalis, 12-19-2004, 08:23 PM
This month has been... let's just say.. not-so-good My current host is getting from bad to worse. Very slow support, lousy uptime, clients call me to complain, you know the drill. Anyway, what I'm interested now is not to let you hear one of those sad stories since x-mas is just around the corner. But I would really like to know the different methods you guys use to keep a website "live". Surely there must be a way not to relie on the uptime garantee of your host. I saw someone talking about ultradns which I'll be looking into in a while. Anyone successfuly implemented a method to keep the website open a-la 7/11 stores? Pls share...
Posted by R.Harrison, 12-19-2004, 08:34 PM
rollover bandwidth for a month? that seems new and cool. community forums are always nice for customers to chat togeather. What always draws me to a host is 24/7 live chat support. I like chatting to someone not through email but maybe through a java chatroom, or irc.
Posted by Lev, 12-19-2004, 08:53 PM
I would say the best way is to invest in a quality host. I don't think there is any other (easy) way unless you buy a server (which would mean the uptime depends more on yourself).
Posted by vitalis, 12-19-2004, 08:59 PM
By the way, priority is on keeping the website "live" even if it isn't "easy".
Posted by ldcdc, 12-19-2004, 09:09 PM
A good host should be able to reach 99.9% uptime each month with few exceptions per year, but perhaps you want something better than that... Is that the case?
Posted by snickn, 12-19-2004, 09:12 PM
This isn't hard to find if you're willing to pay what the service is worth and not looking for extreme-budget and extreme-uptime. I would have to agree with Dan, 99.9% should always be provided, 99.5% should be bare minimum and 99.95% should be expected 11 months out of the year.
Posted by vitalis, 12-20-2004, 06:24 PM
Well, I don't expect budget hosts to provide very high uptimes and support - and anyone who does is in for a ride Hopefully you'll learn after your first mistake... Even the most expensive hosts can't provide 99.99% uptime 99.99% of the occasions. If you know one please point it out to me. This is why there are services like ultradns which, I think, is one of the solutions I would like to know more about. In other words, I would like to know what we resellers could do on our part to keep that uptime higher. Choosing a good reputable host will of course help a lot but in the end we are really at their mercy. Recently I'm into all this uptime and data reliability paranoria because I'll be starting a serious webhosting business and I want to know I've put in 99.9% as a reseller for my clients. I want to have an automated remoted backup setup and a way to re-route traffic to another server if one is down. However, the more I surf forums the more atonished I am. Most people just think their host is good enough; that their host's backups are reliable. My host even said daily backups wouldn't be possible (after advertising so) as it would slow down the servers. I know surely there are things we can do as resellers to protect our own clients data and maybe even obtain a higher uptime than our hosts. Does anyone actually implemented such solutions?
Posted by Captian_Spike, 12-20-2004, 08:11 PM
Theres very little you can do. Find a reliable host and thats about it. The only other method is to pay more, get your own server, invest in clustered machines etc. Otherwise your at the mercy of the host. Its extremely difficult to implement a backup server when your a reseller, getting the traffic routed when the server is down would be fairly easy, but keeping both servers in some sort of sync will be next to impossible without you actually owning the server yourself. Keep in mind customers ussually understand a downtime every so often. They are forgiving if you offer good support, as long as you don´t have down periods longer then 10-15 minutes and they are very rare you should be ok. Of course being a reseller you have little control over this, but if you don´t find the service satisfactory then tell your host to smarten up or you should move on. Also, make sure you find out how your host informs of scheduled downtime, its important to give some type of advanced notice to customers.
Posted by ldcdc, 12-20-2004, 08:36 PM
u2mike is right. Reseller hosting is what it is. One solution would be to go with a reseller host that uses a clustered solution (H-Sphere comes to mind). Your site would be distributed on different machines, so even if one server goes down you'd still have most of your/your customer's sites online.
Posted by vitalis, 12-21-2004, 11:46 AM
Hmm, what about semi-dedicated solutions then? Would I be able to achieve what I want with those? Though I'm learning the ropes here I need someone who actually knows how to manage a server with confidence. I was leaning towards H-Sphere, unfortunately fantastico is not offered in Windows and I have yet to see a customer panel skin that I like. Not that I seen many but I want something like razonskins. Btw, I would like to tell you Dan that I enjoyed reading your articles at whreviews. They are very informative. Thanks for contributing to the webhosting community