[Cialug] dual web servers

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 7:53 AM, Patrick Mcgillan <
patrick.mcgillan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to have a redundant web server in another location that
> answers when the primary doesn't. I have total control of both servers
> and they are both running Debian. I need a nudge on where to look to
> set up this redundancy, especially on the DNS redirection. I am not
> totally sure on what to ask for, other than I am sure it is possible.
>
>
A load balancer doesn't have to be costly. I use Amazon's ELB (Elastic Load
Balancer) service for my EC2 instances. It can detect the health of EC2
instances and remove an instance from the pool. However this assumes that
you're using EC2. Micro instances with 10G of storage cost about $15/mo and
you can run them in different availability zones, which amounts to different
geographic locations.

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

Rackspace also has a load balancer solution that looks like it works with
dedicated servers, though it's not clear to me if this is only for servers
hosted on premises:
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/loadbalancers/

The benefit of a load balancer over DNS is that you get instant failover.

If you have more resources, we use HA Proxy at work. It works great on
Debian systems. http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ For sites that are largely static
content we instead use Squid since we can serve directly from the cache.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/attachments/20111025/8c5d1bf6/attachment.html>