Hi

I am a software developer and I host a number of my clients websites. I am interested in peoples comments (and prices from suppliers) on setting up so that my sql server databases are replicated to another server, and also the files eventually so that I can do failover hosting to the server...

Current server runs windows 2008 and sql server 2008 so the replication would need to be compatible.

I would also be interested from people on who to use to provide DNS failover... so that if server1 is not available it routes requests to the new secondary one.

Thanks

Mark

Generally, DNS failover isn't going to be reliable - if you have more than one (say) www entry in DNS, requests will be distributed in a 'Round-Robin' way. True High Availability would require a separate system monitoring the main server, and if it detects that its down, re-routes data to the other server.

Replication for files and SQL server can be done, but the different methods put different loads on the server (is the server yours, or are you on shared hosting?).

Hi

I am not looking for perfect reliability, its more so that if anything happens to the primary server within 30 minutes it would be working on the other.

The other server is mine, dedicated server

In which case, its not a problem. Take a look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd323622.aspx for details about MS SQL replication methods and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753479(WS.10).aspx which is about DFS file replication (in a master-master method).