Web-server – Local to Remote Webserver Failover

disaster-recoveryfailoverredundancyweb-server

Short and sweet, I don't suppose you'll need more detail than this:

  • We host our website on an in-house
    webserver.

  • A catastrophe has and will happen
    again where communication from the
    web into/out of our building ceases.

  • When this happens, we'd like our
    users to at least see some kind of
    "down for maintenance" or other message (twitter's Fail Whale?) when
    trying to access our site, rather
    than the current "server not found"
    type messages that they currently
    get. (A static server, temporary redirects for all requests).

[Being able to fail-over to a fully functional website would be awesome, but is not required, and probably not an option].

Obviously there has to be some kind of off-site failover that could take over when our local servers are down.

How is such a solution implemented? Other suggestions?

EDIT: If I'm not using (or leaving out) some correct terminology for this, let me know!

Best Answer

  • an offsite reverse proxy can serve up a static page for you when your site cannot be reached
  • Some 3rd party DNS providers can failover to a second IP address if the first one cannot be reached (this failover can take some time though)
  • Setting up an offsite server with a heartbeat/ldirectord could either load balance between your local server and the external one, or just switch to the external one if the internal one is unavailable. This is the method you would use to keep end users from noticing that your site is down. (just make sure they use the same content / database sources)
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