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--------- How do you multi-home a website ??

T

thatsright

Diamond Member
We need to multi home our website into two different locations. Anyone know how to set this up? Any links or other reference material, as I?ve never multi-homed a site and unclear on how to do so.

Thanks.
 
well that is a very wide open question as multi-home means about a few dozen things.

What are you trying to accomplish/want to achieve and we can go from there?
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
well that is a very wide open question as multi-home means about a few dozen things.

What are you trying to accomplish/want to achieve and we can go from there?
Click to expand...

We have our website hosted internally. We want to co-locate the website across town. We have about 10 or so, public ip addresses to use from a single ISP. Each server runs IIS5.1

If the server, or connection ever goes down at Site 1, we want Site 2 to take over the requests while the main server is down. How to setup the routing of this, or fallover I'm a bit unclear about. Would our ISP set this up?
 
i bet you could set something like a load balancer up that would not only switch connections if one failed but balance the load over all the servers

10 IPs? what website are you running for your town that needs 10 IPs or servers?
 
you're probably gonna need some kind of layer7 load balancer. What kind of failover times do you need?

a load balancer presents a single IP to the world and then distributes the content based on what servers in the farm are responding.

Or maybe you should really consider NOT hosting your own web services. You can get much more in terms of uptime if you don't.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
you're probably gonna need some kind of layer7 load balancer. What kind of failover times do you need?

a load balancer presents a single IP to the world and then distributes the content based on what servers in the farm are responding.

Or maybe you should really consider NOT hosting your own web services. You can get much more in terms of uptime if you don't.
Click to expand...


Well, our site is not really that 'load' intensive, that?s for sure. Though all content is developed on site, and we need to have 24/7 access to it if need be, here in the building. But our co-lo will be offsite, across town. We will only own the hardware, but maintence and upkeep will be provided by a 3rd party service.

In terms of failover times, I am completely new on this. Not sure what times a load balancer will allow. If we want a 1 second failover time, is this possible?
 
yes, it is possible.

But you really do need to get away from the model of hosting your own site. You most likely don't have the resources needed and can do it much cheaper by hosting somewhere else.

Start with "what are our goals?"

and then come up with a solution to meet those goals. You'll find that it isn't viable/scalable to do it yourself unless you want to dump 10s of thousands of dollars in gear/multiple ISPs, etc.

You need...
1) an always reachible IP, no matter what
2) something to accept requests to this IP
3) a means to accept requests to this IP and send them where you need them

The first point will cost you a bunch, #2/3 are done with a load balancer/layer7 switch.
 
I have always been a proponent of hosting your web server in house. Like you said, many times you need access, and you are wholely responsible for it.

So if you are looking for a do-it-yourself solution that will failover your website to your co lo you need a piece of hardware to do that. Basically, a device like a router or a firewall, that has software built into it based on the Linux kernel that senses activity on your internet connections and has recative capabilities if the line goes down. Ask youself, if our internet connection goes down, what do we do? Where are the DNS queries going?

Also, at your main location, do you have 2 seperate connections from 2 seperate ISP's?

I do agree with spidey07, you need to get your golas, and your needs, then a strategy established.
 
winn0031, NO NO NO NO NO!

Don't run your company's public web server in house. Colocate it. There are a lot of great colo providers out there at real data centers, with real physical security, real power conditioning and generators (not to mention oil tanks to last them a week), really good air conditioning and humidity controls, and, most importantly, lots of well thought out fiber diversity.

Best of all, it's a competitive market, so cut-throat in fact that you can find colocation sold at a loss. You can't set up the kind of reliability you'll get for anywhere near what you'll pay.

Anyone who has to ask on this forum is far better off colocating at a real hosting provider than trying to bring that level of reliability to their site.

If you NEED physical access to your box, you're doing many things wrong. Even Windows can be remotely administered, more or less.

thatsright, multi-homing means something specific and may or may not be what you want. If you just want reliability, colocate. If you want certain other kinds of performance boosts, or extra reliability guarantees in case your data center gets nuked, talk to a serious colo provider about geographic and/or network diversity.
 
you said:
"What he said. Listen to all of us in the business of running/supporting enterprise-class businesses."

who said anyhting about a enterprise class businesses?

what about the neighborhood small business? or medium sized with a small IT staff?

"real data centers, with real physical security, real power conditioning and generators (not to mention oil tanks to last them a week), really good air conditioning and humidity controls, and, most importantly, lots of well thought out fiber diversity."
forgive me for asking, how much does a service at a facility like that cost?
the op wanted to know how to "multi-home" his website in a location across town, that can be done with with 2 devices that cost a toal of $2600.
i guess i do not know the size, scope, and budget of his project.
 
winn0031, it of course depends on your needs, but basic colocated hosting can be done for tens of dollars per month (shared/VPS) or hundreds of dollars per month (dedicated).

You can't bring in two reasonable public Internet connections for that. Much less the equipment to multi-home, and the technical expertise to set it up and manage it.

The neighborhood small business and the medium sized business with a small IT staff should pay someone else who has economies of scale going for them (and is in a fiercely competitive market, driving down what they can charge).
 
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