Website on more than one server

[Portend]

How would you go about putting your website on three different servers? NOT just putting it on but how do you get it so that if one server should crash your site is still up and running and everything just gets routed to your backup? I have 2 servers of my own and I was wondering how I coiuld accomplish this using NT 4 and IIS?

Thanks in advance

 

[Russ]

<< I was wondering how I coiuld accomplish this using NT 4 and IIS? >>



It doesn't really have that much to do with the server and operating system (other then setting up the site). You need to setup what is known as a &quot;round robin&quot; in the zone file for the domain. Do you have access to the DNS server, or will your registrar or ISP set it up for you?

Russ, NCNE

 

[Garion]

Well... Round Robin will kind of work. It's better for distributing the load between multiple servers. If you have two webservers and one crashes, every other request will still get sent to the dead server and time out. Not what you really want on a production site.

The best thing is a load balancer. This is a piece of hardware that sits between your site and the network and routes packets to the various webservers based on their load and availability. You might check out the Phobos ipXpress. It's a relatively inexpensive ($4K - Most of the big boys are $15K+) that would do the trick quite nicely.

The other way to do it is with some kind of failover or cluster. You'd have to upgrade to Windows 2000 to be able to do a 3 node cluster and buy the cluster software - Not cheap.

And, of course, I'm sure that there's a Linux load balancer.. Never looked for one, but there's a free everything for Linux. Sometimes, however, you get what you pay for.

- G

 

[MustPost]

read the article about the AT servers.

 

[goldboyd]

As Garion said, most load balancers are quite expensive, however you might want to take a look at ebay, with all the dotcoms folding you can often find foundry load balancers on there at a decent price. This can also be accomplished with a linux box, as Anand described in his article about his setup.