[clug] how best to do a backup web server

[Michael Still]

Tony and Robyn Lewis wrote:
> 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.

...

> There will be *some* loss of data, between last sync, and the primary 
> failure, but we can live with that.
> 
> Comments?  Any better ways?

Ummm. I got this email four times. No matter.

A traditional way of doing this would be to have the DNS server do some 
sort of geographical / load balanced / failover mapping of the machines 
with a very short TTL. Another way would be to have a frontend machine 
cluster (think a pair of load balancers) balance traffic to the two 
hosting machines. A poor man's implementation could be achieved with 
iptables.

Mikal