In the light of issue with the Newark host being down right now, killing two of my sites - can anyone post some simple strategies for setting up a redundant host for load balancing? Or point me to an existing document?
load balancing will involve more costs and effort.. if you can afford to, do what i do, just setup a dns failover 'fail whale' site so if main server is down you dns failover to a back web site with a 503 error/maintenance message.
Use something like DNS Made Easy or Amazon Route 53. You basically setup health checks and then have it switch the IP of the offending server to the maintenance server. The tricky part is routing all the DNS through that provider. If you have clients, that means you need to manage their DNS as well or have them use the service with the same fallback. Not a big deal for some but off-putting for others. It would be nice is Linode offered this via their DNS but I don't see it happening.
