I need more redundancy!!

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Posted by midwestmerchant, 12-10-2007, 12:16 AM
Need you help on this everyone. Please remember, I'm still a newb in the web hosting industry. I have a reseller account with a friend of mine and have about 5 client's under me. Over the weekend his server was supposidley hacked and data was lost. He has brought my main site back up but my clients site's have not been put back up yet. This got me to thinking..Thank god I only have 5 client's right now and not 100..But how could this be avoided? So after some thinking I decided..Why not buy another reseller account with someone else and do some sort of Virtual IP where if one box goes down, everything relays to another (sort of like a load balancer i guess) Does anyone here have any idea how this could be done? Considering both resellers would have their own WHM..How would I go about having the information update on both side's? Maybe there is a better way to do this? Basically, what I am looking for is more redundency! I don't want this happening again where one box goes down and my customer's and/or myself is **** out of luck for 24 hours or so. Any thoughts, ideas, tips, or tricks would be very helpful!
Posted by PremiumHost, 12-10-2007, 12:27 AM
You won't be able to setup any redundancy with 1 or 2 reseller accounts. Everything relies on your hosting provider. The only way is rent 2 dedicated box and setup the way you want (it's still not an easy task though)
Posted by ~ServerPoint~, 12-10-2007, 05:10 AM
I think that you need more third party backup solutions instead of other reseller account. I think that it would be less expencive for you and more suitable.
Posted by SSHocker, 12-10-2007, 05:14 AM
The only automated way is with your own dedicated or VPS server. You can do it manually with a reseller account but it is VERY time consuming
Posted by 040Hosting, 12-10-2007, 06:02 AM
Everything is possible for a price, if you are willing to invest you can get quite some redundant solutions, but the question is if you are willing to spend a fortune on it, or that a good backup (off-site) would have been sufficient to restore your sites within a few hours (depending on data and how much your host needs to restore besides your account!). No matter what kind of redundant solution you choose, if the servers get hacked, you still have one solution, the one of restoring your backup data. Hope this help,
Posted by foobic, 12-10-2007, 07:56 AM
Yes, the crucial part is to have good backups of your own, off the main server. Unfortunately taking frequent CPanel backups is a potential problem in itself since the backup process is fairly resource-intensive, but if you have SSH access you can set up automatic rsync backups and run them more frequently. Dump the databases and rsync them too. Remember you need to keep multiple backups, not just the latest, or corrupted data can destroy everything (eg. if the account is hacked). The next step, if you want to go this way, is to get a second reseller account elsewhere and reverse the backup process, ie. changed files get copied from primary server to backup and then to secondary server. This gives you a "hot spare" server ready to bring into use at any time and synchronized to the primary server several times a day. Continuing along this path the next step is to set up dns failover - automatically switching your dns records to point to the secondary server when the primary is unavailable. Be careful with dynamic sites though - you'll need to consider whether you want to let users write to the secondary (eg. post to a forum) in this situation since you can get database changes made on both servers, requiring work to combine them without losing data. In short, even with reseller access many things are possible to minimize downtime at a cost much lower than a true high-availability solution, but there's a fair amount of work involved. You may find it more cost-effective to simply spend more on a reseller account that's more reliable... Even then, keep the best backups you can. HTH
Posted by IGobyTerry, 12-10-2007, 08:27 AM
You don't need more redundancy, you need a better web host yourself. Resellers can be absolutely wonderful web hosts, but you cannot do everything yourself without serverwide access. That is why your web host is just as important to you as you are to your clients. Save yourself some time, money and frustration; find a web host that does all the work for you.
Posted by Richie Yang, 12-10-2007, 09:04 AM
I believe you need more clients. 呵呵
Posted by arbet, 12-10-2007, 09:30 AM
If you really need redundancy, I suggest you try resellerzoom's failover plans.
Posted by RH4U, 12-10-2007, 10:58 AM
inogenius is right. Your web host should have been prepared for something like this. As a reseller i dont think you should have to worry about these things. The primary point of a reseller account is for the reseller to have the advantage of sell hosting without the burden of setting up backups, security protection, etc.
Posted by ldcdc, 12-10-2007, 03:16 PM
I agree with the others, what you basically need at this point is a more reliable host. Keeping things simple is the best way, especially when you're still new at it. Did you use them? How did you find the service? Did you see the failover in action?
Posted by cartika-andrew, 12-10-2007, 03:34 PM
my question was going to be - do you have any stats to show that their failover system is actually more reliable then a good reseller account.
Posted by RH4U, 12-10-2007, 03:55 PM
You could also look into a managed vps solution. Some companies selling vps include a backup solution for free or a slight fee. This would give you more control over account and include a backup solution. It would cost you slightly more per month though however.
Posted by arbet, 12-10-2007, 06:11 PM
I have an Advanced One RZ Plan, and I am extremely happy with it. The server is stable, and I have rarely faced any problems. I have not personally tried their failover plans, but I referred them to it because I have had a good experience with RZ. I have browsed through their forums. Some users are complaining about failover, but this cannot be a sign of bad service because unsatisfied customers usually post more than satisfied customers. I cannot judge whether RZ failover plans are good, because I haven't tried them. But I believe they are worth a try. @CartikaHosting: I don't have any stats since I haven't tried their plans.
Posted by Psi_, 12-10-2007, 07:47 PM
To be honest, for any kind of redundancy, you're gonna need at least a VPS, to play with DNS etc. If you had a VPS you could also use cPanel's automatic FTP backup script.
Posted by Nnyan, 12-10-2007, 08:03 PM
If you want redundancy or need it is your call, but I agree with the others start with a better host and implement your own backups (3rd party or whatever).
Posted by RH4U, 12-10-2007, 08:09 PM
Very true, as psi said you could always do your own backups this way too. Just make sure you choose a good company for a vps. A lot of hosts are offering vps plans, but do some searches before buying..

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