Building a mirror site

[nicco]

Hey all.. after reading this post it seems that I have been doing some thinking.. so feel free to throw your thoughts into it.

In light of the downtime due to the power outage a while back and then the DDOS attacks, I think many are looking for alternatives to obtain more uptime. Now this 24hour+ downtime is a reality check.
Now, I'm not gonna complain about BH, but just throwing some thoughts out there on obtaining more uptime.

Someone mentioned using different hosts listed in the DNS (i.e. a primary dns for one host and a secondardy DNS for another), but that wont work so I began to build my mirror site.
Now that I see somepeople are still down from yesterday (I really feel for you and try to understand how the last 4 hour outage upset me and how 24+ hrs must be driving you crazy.) Yes I threatened to leave BH after that power outage. In searching for another hosting option it seems that everwhere you go there is downtime. So i figured why put 'all my eggs in one basket'?

So my next best bet is a mirror site. Its really a pain to upload everything to two different servers, but now my business cards will have two website addresses (hosted on two different hosts).
Any easier way to have a mirror site?

For the photographers that upload pictures, this may not be the best solution, but it will garantee more uptime. Also, I dont know how your sites are set up via Drupal, or Coppermine, etc or how you display the photos. This may not be a viable solution for some.

Yes it sucks to do everything twice. Now I assume that you could backup your current site and upload it to another server, but again, one big headache. My site is simple enough to do everything twice and just have both domains listed in my Flash banners, graphics etc.

I still haven't figured out where to keep my email. I guess maybe use Gmail and modify MX records and go about it that way to preserve email use when one host (or the other) is down.

Also, I wonder since my content is the same on two domains, if Google will penalize me for duplicate content. anyone know? I thought that maybe I could set the robots not to crawl or cache one of the two sites? any ideas?

anyways.. just offering some options to help in this quest for 100% uptime.
If I could, I would write a script that would try to open one site and if it timed out because it was unavailable then the script would open the other.. but I donw know how or if it can be done.

anyways.. just some thoughts. how about yours?
nicco

[Ben-2k7]

Yep, I feel a mirror site would probably benefit you. My business depends on my website, and I'm going crazy here!

[nicco]

Yep, I feel a mirror site would probably benefit you. My business depends on my website, and I'm going crazy here!

The 4 hours outage affected my business, then I got slammed on the forum for having a business website on a shared hosting plan. Everywhere I looked its shared hosting, unless you want to drop some cash monthly. So now I drop $10 in addition to my $7 here a month to have two hosts.

As your reply reads, a mirror site would benefit me. Would it benefit you also?
or because of what your site is about it wouldn't be good for you?


nicco

[Ben-2k7]

Wouldn't benefit me, because I have TONS of sites, and a forum. The site has registeration, and so does the forum. So if I didnt have mirror content, I couldn't connect the databases, so the website would have less members, and the forum would have less posts than the other site, or visa versa. That would probably work for sites that do not require registeration, but it's still a pain. I advise you to do it though, as if one of the hosts goes down, you could still have a backup site. One thing I do not like, is that when you go to the downed sites, it won't connect, so I'm getting tons of emails saying "where's the website?!1?!!?1" I'd rather be able to edit a message, or atleast have a message up, saying something like, "Bluehost servers are down. The site will be back up ASAP." People regaurd "will not connect" as "site has been deleted, and owner has quit." Again, mirroring would not help me, because my site and forum require registeration.

[shirleymixon]

I may have to consider this too and I have classified ads and forums running....
I think I would put up a copy of my site without the above add-ons, just a replacement page for the ads and the forums saying that they are available on the main site (click here)...
must be careful of all absolute urls tho...I also have banner ads running that I must show (maybe) that I would have to consider, wow - this keeps getting more complicated :-(

[nicco]

hi Shirley,
now i realize that my site is so simple its feasible.. but for youz with members, forums, classified and other add-ons its not the best alternative.

Your idea for the duplicate content and a link to your forums is a decent alternative, because you could control the message on the mirrored site to warn users that your forum or classifieds are temp down.
You can control your mirror site, as Ben-2k7 suggested, with a message about the site (or forum or classifieds) are temporarily down.

as for the absolute URL's,.. I used alot of them in my templates so I could have my pages on any 'level' (folders deep) and still have the links work.
I changed the domain names / URL's using NoteTabLight's find and replace function. (i.e. find www.olddomain.com and replace with www.mirrordomain.com) Note tab light is free so that works for me. ;)


nicco