[clug] how best to do a backup web server

[Tony and Robyn Lewis]

I'm helping a friend with some hosting.  He's getting dedicated hosting 
with two separate providers, to give geographical diversity, and so 
higher availability.

What's they best way to provide this?

I think traditional clustering is out of the question - there will be no 
shared storage, and they don't tend to work well over IP / WANs.  Plus 
the IP address failover sounds awfully hard on the big bad internet 
(read, most likely impossible)

I was thinking of mysqldump + rsync to keep everything up to date on the 
second server (on selective dirs, of course, and handling different real 
world IPs), plus having low TTL on DNS.

When the primary server goes down, we change the NS glue to point to the 
new server, and wait.

There will be *some* loss of data, between last sync, and the primary 
failure, but we can live with that.

Comments?  Any better ways?