

Where to go after dedicated hosting - rolandojones

We are a medium sized business with about 250,000 registered users and up until this point have done fine with a Dedicated Server at HostGator. I have become fed up with their impersonal support (a different person responds to every support request) and am now facing our second hard drive failure in 3 months, which they remedy by taking the site down for 6 hours to do a hard drive and OS re-install.<p>I am now looking into Managed hosting solutions, primarily with HostWay and Rackspace.<p>I'm not a server admin by any means, but it seems to me that in order to avoid the down time associated with a hard drive failure that 2 web servers and probably a load balancer are required. Is that true?<p>Generally speaking, what is the next step for hosting when a dedicated server doesn't cut it anymore from an availability point of view?
======
arn
What about a RAID 1 setup (mirrored). If a hard drive dies, you just have to
schedule a swap out, which shouldn't take that long, and you could schedule
during a lull in your usual traffic.

That would just defend against an abrupt hard drive failure, and is probably
the cheapest short term solution unless you want to mirror a second server or
on-demand cloud hosting. I run a large vbulletin server, and in my most recent
server upgrade, I've configured my attachment server in this config for that
reason.

------
rolandojones
We do have some clients that are very concerned with security (fortune 100
banks), so I am hesitant to go the cloud computing direction.

Our current server is powerful enough, but the challenge with a dedicated
server is, how do you keep your site up if the hard drive fails?

As far as EC2 I'm used to developing on a LAMP stack and I'm not sure what
that transition would look like.

We're a small shop (it's essentially me working as a full stack developer) so
we don't have that many resources.

Thanks for your insights!

~~~
MPSimmons
With servers of even the low end of the middle, there should always be
redundant system disks. The next step up in servers from what you have should
use RAID-1 mirrored disks.

Availability is a sliding scale in terms of reliability and money. You don't
pay for stopping things that will happen, you pay to stop things that /could/
happen. The additional cost of a real RAID card plus an additional disk is
insurance against the single drive failure that would make your machine
unavailable. Your redundant power supplies do the same thing. As do your
redundant NICs.

Disaster planning is the art of asking, "What if..." and having answers. Of
course, for every answer, a certain amount of money is required.

My advice to you is to either go to the cloud now, before you invest more
money in a physical infrastructure, or if thats not possible, buy "real"
hardware and don't use what are essentially glorified laptops in a server
case.

Get a server that is rackmountable, has redundant hard drives (and if the
server has system disks and data disks, configure it so that the system disks
are a mirrored RAID-1 pair, and the data disks are not RAID-5), that has
redundant power supplies, and redundant network cards.

It really does sound expensive when you list it out like that, but those
features are so standard that you can't really avoid them if you buy middle-
class or higher servers.

Here's a guest blog post I did on redundancy last year for SysAdvent:
<http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html>

------
tshtf
Have you thought about Amazon EC2? With careful planning you can have
scalability, DR, and availability.

------
eof
You may not need a load balancer yet.. you can't just get a new, bigger
server?

We use rackspace's managed hosting solutions as well as their cloud. I wasn't
here for the set up of everything, but I can say for certain the support is
very, very good.

I would look into moving into the cloud as well if you don't have legal
reasons for not doing it.

