July 28, 2005

Curious, George: Good Colocation Host I've been tasked with finding a good colocation host to use as a backup to our web servers...

Of course, our current host recommends themselves as a backup :-) but I'm looking for someone thats 'economically and geographically independant'. We need to colocate two or three servers with modest bandwitch demands and 99.999 uptime - a day or two of downtime would knock us out of business. Cost is not the primary factor here, so I'm not looking the cheapest, but the easiest to deal with and most reliable :-) Second to this, what are the replication solutions for Linux boxes? The boxes run the standad LAPP stack (PostgreSQL not MySQL) with a few other thingies on them - but nothing that isn't also on a million other servers... I dont need 'instant failover' or anything, just a hot spare, in a different environment that we can get ready in the time it takes DNS to switch... It's a new area for me - anyne have any direct experience?

  • er, im in the US by the way.
  • I'm not that involved with the IT decisions made around here, but for up-time, we've had fabulous luck with rackspace. Even when we switched servers, we've never had any downtime. Unfortunately, though, I think we might have a dedicated server, not colocation, so it might not be what you're looking for.
  • oh goot lord, must have the ADD and the dyslexia looked at... My brain wacky parsed that as COLONATION and thought is was some wacky way kids today were um, cleansing themselves, and wondered for even a brief moment how the BEST web server could solve the problem. Oy.
  • Hey - I'll take colonation if I can't get a good colocation :-)
  • ok, just asked a friend who knows about this stuff, and here's his advice (reformatted, but otherwise untouched): "Well, as for colocation, Data Foundry is an excellent provider. Definitely not the cheapest, but for colo's in Austin, you prolly can't beat the quality and professionalism. I would strongly suggest you tour Data Foundry, as well as 2 other places before you make any decisions, though. Ask questions like backup UPS/generators, size and number of uplinks, security, building structural strength, staffed 24x7 ( that's extremely important ), free simple hands ( reboots, power checks, things like that that are simple for a NOC tech to do, and tell you the results ). I'm sure there are more questions, but take the tours and see what you like. As for replication services, linux has various things you can do here. I'm not sure what kind of replication you're looking for, though.. Database replication can be handled by the databases themselves-ie MySQL has built in replication facilities that works pretty well. If you're talking entire system replication, then it gets much more complicated. Simple "replication" can be done using a RAID mirroring setup, that way if you lose the computer, or one of the drives, you just yank the good drive and drop it into another server and you're 99% done."