Back up site on another hosting company

Is it possible to make a back up of a site on another hosting company? Basically if one server goes down, then it immediately kicks over to the back up server. If so, have you actually done this without any problems. I had a friend try this, but had problems with the emails getting routed to the wrong server. He eventually took down the backup. (We both had hosting reseller accounts at different companies)

Thanks for the help.

-Jeff

[bagel50]

possible, but not easy. look over at webhostingtalk.com for many many threads on the matter.

Olly

Thanks. I checked out the site briefly.

I'll dig deeper over there.

-Jeff

[awibble]

Getting it to kick over to another server is the hardest part, but you could signup with 2 hosting companies and make sure all the data is copied onto both servers...

Then when one fils change the dns setting to point to the other, which doesnt seem to be taking long to update any more (just a few hours)

--MATT

[bagel50]

Hi.

Yes, you have to make sure that data's current on both hosts for it to work, which may be difficult if you're a reseller and have to synchronise say 50 sites.
If in DNS as many subdomain records are possible are CNAMES (such as the mail subdomain that is used to access the mail server) and there is one A record showing that mydomain.com. points to a particular IP address, then you can change that one IP address over and the whole shebang should move to that new IP address, i.e. your new host. You need a low TTL to make this quick, and you need your DNS externally managed for all the records to be available when your primary host is down - otherwise in many cases DNS is on the same box as your website. Enom do this DNS management cheaply for example, I believe hostgator have some link to them... Some DNS management services even do automatic failover, changing A records to point at different IPs. This is not really suitable for short outages of say an hour or less, unless you have your TTL really low, and some ISPs override low TTL values because they generate too much DNS traffic, and do caching. Also, because of the difficulty and bandwidth cost of keeping a site constantly up to date on two hosts if they're on shared hosting, you'll probably have a secondary site that's 1 day old at best, which could be a problem on a dynamic site.

The way I'd use failover, is to provide a "sorry, server down" page. I already have backup MX records ensuring that incoming mail is not lost. It's up to resellers whether or not they'd like customers to see a page like the above or the normal browser "site not found" message.... either could be damaging, and the server down page could get cached by DNS caches that ignore low TTL.
There are pros and cons to it.

Since this is the presales forum, I guess you're thinking of joining hostgator. I would encourage you to do so They're a good host.

Sorry my last response was undetailed, I didn't have too much time.

Olly


[Edit: You could failover to another hostgator server if you own accounts on both servers. In this way you'd avoid actual bandwidth costs because nothing would leave their network in the updating. I'm not sure if their system could take this into account, though, and I've never seen anyone do it. Just a thought.]

Thanks for the details. It is a daunting task for the reseller, and yes I am considering joining. I currently use another reseller service, and I am extremely happy, but I am having a weird issue with the sites not visible on some ISP's. The requests are timing out at level3.net's server in Miami.

I'm still a newbie at all this. Basically a web designer turned hosting reseller. So all the help given is really appreciated.

-jeff