Since we have been adding servers here at Geek News Central, I have been wanting to make sure that we have some things in place in case we blow a hard-drive or have a hacker incident etc. First thing was to move DNS services off all of our servers and onto a professional DNS Service.
I was introduced to Nettica by Tim who has done, server and design work for me. What impressed me was the price, 100 domains, $50.00 a year and a smoking web based interface. They are not a fly bu night company they have their servers in multi-tiered hosting facilities and spread out as near as I can tell in 5 different places in the country.
They also have a service call FailSafe which will watch our groups of servers and if one of them goes down will route the traffic to a backup. Thus we are now in the process of mirroring all of the critical domains so that if we do go down for a hardware failure we will be able to come back online within a 15 minute window.
It will be a couple of weeks before we are done doing all of the migrating and have the mirrors in place and it is a significant investment but at this point we cannot afford to go down. We have even went so far as to have a server pre-configured to step in and become a new mirror if needed.
We will be testing the failure and recovery pieces here in the coming weeks but will let you know in advance when it is going to happen. Check out Nettica yourself.
Todd, I listened to a couple of MP3’s which were phone calls between Nettica and GoDaddy, it wasn’t good.