website - redundancy and failure

After researching various hosts, I still get the feeling that it is somewhat impossible to get a host that would never go down.

Maybe these hosts employ redundancy, maybe they do not. Either case, how would one display a friendly message to the use开发者_StackOverflowr along the lines of "BRB". What if your host goes down completely for an hour? You would need a way to tell users you would be back. How do you accomplish that?

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I doubt any ISP or hosting provider would do that for you. To archieve that you need very expensive and complicated infrastructure like redundant fail-safe routers and backbones in addition to servers of course - and you need multiple. The concepts like Simple Failover requires DNS updates which take minutes to hours to propagate normally, so it's not a 100% solution either. See a good Joel's article for a related discussion.

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If the host is down and you're on a single server, then you are definitely down. This is a limitation of shared hosting... there's not much you can do about it. You can ask your host if you are hosted on multiple servers for redundancy... if so, then you wouldn't have to worry about it.

If you host your own server, then you could maybe get your hands on Simple Failover and maybe have a cheap Virtual Dedicated server that goes UP when your primary goes down.

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Ok, every host will have downtime at some point. Your best bet would be to go with someone who has the great customer service that can help get your box back up. 99% of the time when your box goes down its your fault (if you have access to the OS/Apache etc).

The people at Rackspace are awesome for hosting + customer service. The rackspace cloud is great allowing you to create and take down servers instantly. (slicehost is good for persistent boxes charged by month, also owned by rackspace)

As for a way to communicate to your users, i would employ twitter, tumblr, or a hosted blog service. This way if your box goes down you can communicate your message via these services which are most likely on a different host/network.