Originally Posted by raymor (Post 18145998)

While we love Amerinoc and highly recommend them for many people's hosting requirements,
it sounds like you're looking for something special.

NONE of the hosts mentioned in this thread are in the business of High Availability (HA).
Amerinoc's VPS is probably the closest you are going to get, since it's a) running on an
HA cluster and b) from a top notch company, but the VPS itself is not set up for HA.

If you want greater than 99.99%, you're talking about a specific High Availability set up.
You may want to work with a qualified sysadmin who is NOT trying to sell you
something to advise you on what will really meet your needs, possibly setting up fail
over between two VPS hosted at two different data centers.

The HA stuff keeps the SERVER up, but a separate issue is the SITE - what if it's hacked,
you accidentally delete something important, etc. The SERVER could still be up while the
SITE is down. That's where you need a top notch, properly designed enterprise grade back
up and disaster recovery system in place. With the typical "gee, I guess we can copy the
files on to this old cassette tape drive and hopefully it'll all restore OK" approach, it will take
between hours and days to restore a hacked site, so you need something better than what
the web host throws in for free, or for an extra $5. You'll notice I said back up and
recovery system. Most people forget that you actually have to be able to recover a
working system in a reasonable time, and it has to be tested to actually work right when
you need to recover.

In fact, depending on the complexity of the server, a top notch back up and recovery system
like Clonebox could serve your HA needs as well. It makes an extra bootable copy of your
server, actually four extra copies of your whole server. When your server or host does go down,
Clonebox can take over serving your site. For most sites, Clonebox can take over in a
matter of minutes. That's for you to decide if a 5 - 10 minute switchover is OK in case your
main server goes down. If not, you want a pair of servers set up for HA, then the back up
and disaster recovery is a separate system.

Originally Posted by eurabia (Post 18147312)

Quality post. Yea, I do want HA but I also don't want it to cost $3000/month. I know there are setups that if hardware on 1 server fails, then another one starts serving the site within 1-2 mins. That'd be cool. Any suggestions for that? My budget is $100-$1000/month.

Also, I'm mostly concerned about hardware failures. Network uptime are extremely strong almost everywhere because datacenters got that shit on lock. As far as software, I also understand that a good admin can get that shit onlock too. The hardware failures are the fucking pain in the ass. Hosts brag that "we guarantee 1 hour hardware replacements, isnt that awesome". No FUCK YOU, that's fucking horrible, that means my site will be down for up to 1 hour!

Originally Posted by dubsix (Post 18147349)

Keep in mind *MOST* of these "hosts" around here do not own the facility, do not own the hardware, and are either coloing 1-2 racks in someone else's facility or are reselling servers from someone else. Of course they can't meet those type of requirements.

Lots of fake it until you make it going on around here :)

Originally Posted by Brad Mitchell (Post 18147466)

If owning the $400,000,000 Tier IV site that we put 1500 servers in is a prerequisite, count me out. LOL

Brad

Originally Posted by dready (Post 18147926)

Mojohost +1

top - 09:29:24 up 1053 days

Originally Posted by BNMedia (Post 18143037)

I have two boxes at Webair and have never noticed any downtime at all in the 18 months I have hosted there.

Originally Posted by RyuLion (Post 18149718)

2 boxes for 9+ years (our servers)
2 boxes for 4+ years (client)
1 new box 1 year (client)
No problems, when I need a upgrade or install, its fast with no charge usually.
Decent price, personal level support.
They've even helped me with some of my other clients hosted at other locations. :2 cents:
:pimp

Originally Posted by neilmc (Post 18147863)

[root@localhost ~]# uptime
14:49:50 up 693 days, 17:31, 3 users, load average: 0.50, 0.50, 0.65
[root@localhost ~]#

That's some pretty good uptime.

Originally Posted by dubsix (Post 18147349)

Keep in mind *MOST* of these "hosts" around here do not own the facility, do not own the hardware, and are either coloing 1-2 racks in someone else's facility or are reselling servers from someone else. Of course they can't meet those type of requirements.

Lots of fake it until you make it going on around here :)

Originally Posted by eurabia (Post 18147312)

Quality post. Yea, I do want HA but I also don't want it to cost $3000/month. I know there are setups that if hardware on 1 server fails, then another one starts serving the site within 1-2 mins. That'd be cool. Any suggestions for that? My budget is $100-$1000/month.

Also, I'm mostly concerned about hardware failures. Network uptime are extremely strong almost everywhere because datacenters got that shit on lock. As far as software, I also understand that a good admin can get that shit onlock too. The hardware failures are the fucking pain in the ass. Hosts brag that "we guarantee 1 hour hardware replacements, isnt that awesome". No FUCK YOU, that's fucking horrible, that means my site will be down for up to 1 hour!

Originally Posted by eurabia (Post 18147295)

Nothing against them, only hear good things about them and I did take a look at them but the whole "request a quote" thing really turns me off; plus there's no Cpanel. Even though I want fully managed, I also want Cpanel.

Originally Posted by raymor (Post 18150070)

On the "1 hour hardware replacements", if a drive fails it may take several more hours to
copy the data or restore from back up, so you'll want at least RAID 1,5, or 10 (not RAID 0).

Also if you're having a LOT of hardware problems, be aware that with SOME web hosts,
every problem is reported as a "hardware problem".

Basically, there are two ways to go with this. Live local fail over and remote backup fail over. Each has advantages and disadvantages. It sounds like you may want both - local for
nearly instant fail over and remote for when someone says "oops".

local failover
protects ONLY from actual hardware failure - not mistakes, not hackers, not DC issues, etc.
1-5 minute switchover
cost roughly double the normal single server cost + $750 set up and extra hardware

remote backup failover
protects from everything - such as the Planet fire which took out 9,000 servers, the FBI raids where they've confiscated entire data centers due to one customer, etc., mistakes, hackers, etc.
cost is $24 / month
switch over roughly 10-20 minutes

Originally Posted by rowan (Post 18153639)

I don't want to seem like a smartass but I have to say that there's at least 3 hosts recommended in this thread that have had significant (ie, multiple hour) outages. I'm not saying that to diss them, which is why I am not mentioning their names, more to point out that even a host with excellent average uptime is probably more likely to have a rare extended outage rather than a bunch of little 30 second blips over the months... both of those scenarios average out to the same, but the former has a much greater impact on clients.

BTW, posting the uptime value of a server really only demonstrates that they've never lost power or crashed. A network outage could still result in the box unreachable for hours. :2 cents:

Originally Posted by rowan (Post 18153639)

I don't want to seem like a smartass but I have to say that there's at least 3 hosts recommended in this thread that have had significant (ie, multiple hour) outages.