Mirroring an onsite hosted website

[IT_Man_Dan]

Hi,

 

I've just set up an inhouse web server to host our school website on. I was wondering what the best way of redirecting visitors to a different server would be should the internet connection drop?

 

I either want to be able to direct users to a page on another server explainging that the site is down or have a mirror copy of the site on the other server that is used when our server's unobtainable.

 

Would I be able to use a php script to check the status of the server and then redirect to another server if necessary?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Regards

Dan

[MK-2]

If the first copy is in-house and the connection dies, how will people get to the php file to redirect them to the external copy as that would also be hosted internally wouldn't it?

 

Might just be me not thinking about this properly though, sorry

[powdarrmonkey]

Hi,

 

I've just set up an inhouse web server to host our school website on. I was wondering what the best way of redirecting visitors to a different server would be should the internet connection drop?

 

 

If you're going to host a copy somewhere else anyway, whats the point of having it in house? Put it in a datacentre where the connection is stable to start with. Shared hosting is dirt cheap nowadays, even I can host it for you.

[CESIL]

I'd have to agree with hosting off-site.

 

I failed at a job interview a while ago for a web developer role because the tech manager wanted to bring all hosting in-house to "save money". He didn't like it when I suggested that having staff available 24/7 to fix problems would cost more than a decent hosting deal...

 

Or maybe it was because I said I wouldn't want to be called out at all hours to fix things...

[powdarrmonkey]

Of course, if you really want to do this, the best way would be a hardware load balancer at your ISP, just upstream of you, but this will cost you ££££.

[mossj]

Isn't there some settings when you configure your domain? that says if you wait so long on one ip, go to the next.

 

Can't rember the name as we host off-site, for the reason of it being reliable and *dirt cheap*