Complicated Hosting Solution....
Recently one of these boxes went down, the PSU fan had failed and the machine shut itself down (Compaq diagnostics detected the failed fan and shut it down), since the server is FMS (Facility Managed), it was brought to the attention of the tech's almost instantly, but they had issues and thought it was performing a backup (dont ask), so they did not touch it, after about 20 mins we found out the site was down, in short, it took them over 3 hrs to replace the PSU and get the box working again (this should have been a 20 min jobby), in that time, a number of the clients who are hosting sites on this box started to have a good moan....
What we need is a solution, so that in short, if the site or server goes down (IP not responding, site not responding etc), that we can somehow display an error message page (formatted HTML, or perhaps even host the site (mirroring?) on another server, on an entirely different network (for example, my ISP network).....
The idea of round robin DNS has been thought of, but we want all site traffic to go to the live server and if the server goes down, to redirect to a different IP (and entirely different network) to display a service unavailable page.....
It would be relatively easy to purchase and install a load balancing device (for example RadWare....) in the Tier 1 ISP, and have it load balancing between servers, if the primary host goes down, it would redirec to another server with the unavailable page, all seems very easy and feasible to do....
However, if the Tier 1 network were to go down (say the switch in the rack were to die, something got unplugged or entire network failure on say a core router or switch), then the above load balancing solution would be a waste of time.....
I have thought of Round Robin DNS to go between my host and the Tier 1 ISP, a script would reside on my box, which would attempt to contact the primary host, if it was successul, it would redirect to that, otherwise it would show the unavailable page..... any ideas ?
Thanx !
