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  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2009
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    Business Class Hosting?

    I've been hosting small business and individual's sites for several years and have been quite happy with my VPS and daily backups but am now moving up to host bigger businesses sites and some business critical sites.

    What sort of hosting should I be looking at for these sites where high availability, high performance, backup and disaster recover are essential?

    Would be grateful for any advice or sugegstions on the sort of thing I should be looking for and any other criteria that I should take into consideration.

    Thanks,
    Benz1

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2009
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    264
    Take a look at sliqua. I'm very happy with them.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2010
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    Modesto California
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    Depending on the traffic of those sites, you should probably be looking at Dedicated Hosting (preferably managed if you are not comfortable with managing your own server).
    Looking for an awesome VPS Offer? CLICK HERE

    "Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do." – Bruce Lee

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Washington
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    324
    Sounds like each site will be a different situation. Do you have any larger accounts that will need a full dedicated server all by themselves? Are you just looking for a dedicated server for yourself to host all your accounts on? I would recommend getting with any potential host and tell them what your needs are and see what they can offer or recommend. You will want a host that has been around awhile and has a track record if you are going to put your business in their hands.
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  5. #5
    I suggest you to go to most powerfull VPS.

    - It will cover your needs.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Location
    Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    554
    It depends on what the client needs. Some might need their own dedicated server, probably not if you're hosting them all on a VPS right now. From what you've said, it would appear that you'd probably want some sort of dedicated server, if you're finding a VPS isn't doing what you need.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Posts
    50
    Thanks for the replies and PM's.

    The bigger clients I need to host now are new clients, not currently on the VPS. I'll leave the current ones where they are, just need advice on how to be able to provide high availability, redundant, reliable hosting for medium sized businesses who rely on their websites.

    A managed, dedicated server or managed dedicated VPS per client would take care of performance but what do you do about redundancy and DR? How do corporates host their mission critical sites? Not talking about the likes of Amazon with server farms, etc, but smaller companies and national brands that have a busy ecommerce site and need 99.99+% uptime.

    I've been down the path of frequent backups to a secondary server with automatic failover but gave up after trying to synchronize databases and email. Have a cloud based VPS but cloud is still in its infancy and I'm not comfortable relying on it for business critical sites. So how else do you ensure high availability? Clustering, etc? I'm open to any suggestions or recommendations for Enterprise level hosting, (although am a bit wary of the term "Enterprise" as I had a 32 hour outage with an "Enterprise Level" VPS with one of the better known hosts following a catastrophic disk failure).

    Thanks again.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    76
    Nice topic.
    I'm also interested on how to archive high availability and reliable website. DNS failover seems to be the solution, but i can't find the efficient way to synchronize database between two different host.

  9. #9
    I suppose that good (even low end) VPS from the company will be good idea for small business instead of shared hosting.
    But I suppose that is better to consider managed solution for VPS of course.

  10. #10
    As I know there are companies which provide shared packages with a great amount of resources and that will be fine for you.
    But a VPS is always better than a shared plan.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Posts
    50
    Let's rule out shared hosting, there is no way I would risk hosting a mission critical corporate website on a shared host!

  12. #12
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Posts
    50
    Just to be clear, I am not especially looking for recommendations for VPS or shared hosts but rather the concept of how reliable, redundant and high availability hosting can be provided for medium sized business/corporate clients. Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't see how any standard VPS or shared host can guarantee high availability running on a single node?

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Oct 2009
    Posts
    352
    Quote Originally Posted by Tank71 View Post
    Take a look at sliqua. I'm very happy with them.
    (No chat for quick pre-sales questions) + (no prices and no trasparency) = no good!

  14. #14
    For our customers here we use a pair of Load Balancer and has a shared web farm which round robin the request.

    offline server are immediately remove from the pool and it has work wonder.

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    697
    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    Just to be clear, I am not especially looking for recommendations for VPS or shared hosts but rather the concept of how reliable, redundant and high availability hosting can be provided for medium sized business/corporate clients. Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't see how any standard VPS or shared host can guarantee high availability running on a single node?
    a cluster of (2) webservers with shared storage and a hardware loadbalancer in front - or a *very* good cloud host.
    The difference is that the cluster enables failover on any error condition, whereas the cloud(ish) solution would either just mean a VPS that will be restarted if a host fails (not really what HA means... meh), or running the websites on N cloud VPS with data being synchronised at the application layer.

    If you can find a real unix hosting shop then you might get the clustered solution from them. Otherwise "build your own thing in the sky" might also work :>

    Here in Germany I could name for example Plusline as a professional hoster, other countries no idea
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  16. #16
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Location
    Germany
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    Quote Originally Posted by kellogs View Post
    For our customers here we use a pair of Load Balancer and has a shared web farm which round robin the request.

    offline server are immediately remove from the pool and it has work wonder.
    Offtopic:

    Yeah, i still have some iPivot/Nortel loadbalancers in my lab that would remove a server from the pool if it returned a "500" or similar.

    What kind of load balancer are you using? Is it saving you a lot of headaches over other failover solutions?
    Check out my SSD guides for Samsung, HGST (Hitachi Global Storage) and Intel!

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Posts
    360
    You need a reliable hosting provider that will help you work with your clients. Such provider should offer shared hosting, as well as VPS and dedicated. That way, they can provide you as your business and client base grows larger.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    Thanks for the replies and PM's.

    The bigger clients I need to host now are new clients, not currently on the VPS. I'll leave the current ones where they are, just need advice on how to be able to provide high availability, redundant, reliable hosting for medium sized businesses who rely on their websites.

    A managed, dedicated server or managed dedicated VPS per client would take care of performance but what do you do about redundancy and DR? How do corporates host their mission critical sites? Not talking about the likes of Amazon with server farms, etc, but smaller companies and national brands that have a busy ecommerce site and need 99.99+% uptime.

    I've been down the path of frequent backups to a secondary server with automatic failover but gave up after trying to synchronize databases and email. Have a cloud based VPS but cloud is still in its infancy and I'm not comfortable relying on it for business critical sites. So how else do you ensure high availability? Clustering, etc? I'm open to any suggestions or recommendations for Enterprise level hosting, (although am a bit wary of the term "Enterprise" as I had a 32 hour outage with an "Enterprise Level" VPS with one of the better known hosts following a catastrophic disk failure).

    Thanks again.
    Keep it simple.

    Use a dedicated server from a provider that has excellent network uptime with SLA. You could also use CloudLinux to stop one site hogging all of the server resources and causing other business sites to go down. You can even control how much CPU/memory each site can use + more.

    That will offer the best uptime/performance. Less complicated setup too.

    Finally, you can make backups to offsite backup account/server (depending on how much data needs to be backed up).
    HostXNow - Shared Web Hosting | Semi Dedicated Hosting | Enterprise Reseller Hosting | VPS Hosting

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location
    Lake Zurich, IL
    Posts
    436
    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    A managed, dedicated server or managed dedicated VPS per client would take care of performance but what do you do about redundancy and DR? How do corporates host their mission critical sites? Not talking about the likes of Amazon with server farms, etc, but smaller companies and national brands that have a busy ecommerce site and need 99.99+% uptime.
    Redundancy and DR highly depend on the structure of the application(s). As you add synchronization, fail-over, and fail-back, the lower the recovery time objective, the more expensive it gets. 99.99% is a little over 4 minutes per month of downtime, so not much to work with if you plan to never have any maintenance periods (sometimes maintenance periods simply aren't possible).

    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    I've been down the path of frequent backups to a secondary server with automatic failover but gave up after trying to synchronize databases and email. Have a cloud based VPS but cloud is still in its infancy and I'm not comfortable relying on it for business critical sites. So how else do you ensure high availability? Clustering, etc? I'm open to any suggestions or recommendations for Enterprise level hosting, (although am a bit wary of the term "Enterprise" as I had a 32 hour outage with an "Enterprise Level" VPS with one of the better known hosts following a catastrophic disk failure).
    Was the provider you had problems with transparent about their infrastructure? Depending on the size of the opportunity, it is always best to visit the facility, have a face-to-face meeting (or multiple meetings), read the SLA in detail to be sure it has a significant warranty for the service, and be sure you have the mobile phones of the people in charge. This is how I would interpret "Enterprise level hosting". This isn't your typical budget provider, of course, but for mission critical sites, you wouldn't choose one of these anyways.

    Eric
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  20. #20
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Posts
    50
    Quote Originally Posted by kellogs View Post
    For our customers here we use a pair of Load Balancer and has a shared web farm which round robin the request.

    offline server are immediately remove from the pool and it has work wonder.
    Quote Originally Posted by wartungsfenster View Post
    a cluster of (2) webservers with shared storage and a hardware loadbalancer in front - or a *very* good cloud host.
    The difference is that the cluster enables failover on any error condition, whereas the cloud(ish) solution would either just mean a VPS that will be restarted if a host fails (not really what HA means... meh), or running the websites on N cloud VPS with data being synchronised at the application layer.

    If you can find a real unix hosting shop then you might get the clustered solution from them. Otherwise "build your own thing in the sky" might also work :>
    I wouldn't be comfortable relying on a single box, even a dedicated server so these types of solution are more like what I'm looking for.

    So where would I go to find something like a shared web farm, or a cluster of webservers, with load balancers?

    Who do you consider to be a a *very* good cloud host? What's an N cloud VPS?

    Thanks.

  21. #21
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Location
    Victoria, Australia
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    36,941
    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    Thanks for the replies and PM's.
    Who has been PMing?

  22. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    So where would I go to find something like a shared web farm, or a cluster of webservers, with load balancers?
    Even those kind of setups can fail.
    HostXNow - Shared Web Hosting | Semi Dedicated Hosting | Enterprise Reseller Hosting | VPS Hosting

  23. #23
    Join Date
    May 2009
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    50
    Quote Originally Posted by HostXNow View Post
    Even those kind of setups can fail.
    Sure, anything can (and will) fail but surely a cluster or server farm is less likely to fail than a single server (all other factors being equal)?

  24. #24
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by benz1 View Post
    Sure, anything can (and will) fail but surely a cluster or server farm is less likely to fail than a single server (all other factors being equal)?
    With these kinds of setups you still have a single point of failure. You always will have, but it is about pushing the single point of failure as far as possible in order to ensure as little downtime as possible.
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  25. #25
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
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    I know of one company whos diskless services receive rave reviews and have the kind of scalability, redundancy and balancing that you're looking for.

    Check out http://www.ultraspeed.co.uk. If you call them and talk about what you're after, they'll be able to advise you on what's best and how to achieve it.
    miniVPS - UK Based Value and Premium VPS Servers!
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