amuck-landowner

high availability shared hosting

willie

Active Member
I'm trying to help someone with a fairly simple, low traffic Wordpress blog (1000 hits/day tops) that's commercial enough that outages have to be minimized ("My web site is dowwwwwn!!!").  I'd hoped to get a simple cpanel web hosting plan with multiple servers on a multicast IP or something like that, but the one inquiry I made got a proposal that I thought was serious overkill (multiple 1GB vps's).  Any suggestions?  Budget is $20/month max but of course lower is better.  The person is not technical so a hosted web plan is preferable to a VPS that needs to be looked after.  The site should have no single points of failure but minor degradation (like comments getting out of sync) in case of one server being out is ok, if there's a reasonable way to clean up afterwards.


The person could possibly also use some (paid) help performance tuning the wordpress instance, since it's disappointingly slow at the moment, given how simple it is (basic wordpress plus a few common plugins).  If you're good at that, feel free to PM.


Thanks!
 

graeme

Active Member
True high availability with no single point of failure will be out of that price range or a lot of work to set up. Have you looked at PHP cloud hosts? I think you are going to have to make some trade offs between cost, ease of set up and availability.


If you can compromise to "better than the typical shared host" try https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net which is where I host all my PHP sites. They do have a lot of redundancy and downtime is rare. Its somewhat harder to work with than the average host, and customer support is limited but its a lot easier than a VPS, of course.
 

CenTex Hosting

Member
Verified Provider
What you are wanting is setting up a cluster and that is not cheap.


If your code is good then you should not have an issue on a shared server. Unless you went with a host like godaddy and there is 20k sites on that same server. That is where you start running into issues of the site going down as others are pulling all the resources.


You need to look for a host that is not going to over sale. that has cloud linux, light speed and so on set up. 


If you are with a good host, and your coding is good you should not go down with the number of visitors that you listed.
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
http://www.cloudways.com/


Seriously.  The guys from Cloudways were on a podcast I was listening to a few months back and this is basically everything you need/want to recommend to your friend.  They do managed hosting on DO/Vultr/AWS/Google Cloud.  They do cheap for starter/low traffic websites and have a proper SLA setup: http://www.cloudways.com/en/sla.php 


Basically setup and forget.  They manage your server for you. 
 

willie

Active Member
Shoot me a pm, i can get it real cheap

Fenzox, what exactly are you offering?


HalfEatenPie, thanks, Cloudways does look interesting, but it basically looks like managed Wordpress (etc.) hosting on an underlying cloud VPS with no failover.  Am I wrong about that?


CenTex, yes, you're probably right; the site is currently with BlueHost and the host has had outages at critical moments.  SLA's where you get a month credit ($5 or whatever) for the outage isn't that helpful if the lost revenue is a lot higher than that.  Thus the quest for actual HA.


I notice DigitalOcean and others have 1-click Wordpress installs so that seems like a possibility.  OVH Cloud VPS at $9/month have this too--and they use OpenStack and Ceph so they can quickly migrate VPS between physical servers in cases of hardware failures.  But of course BHS had a day-long fiber cut recently that kept the whole data center offline for that long.  So I was hoping for HA with geographic separation.  It doesn't seem that hard to do and I'm surprised there's no affordable product like that.  I could do it with three 128MB BuyVM VPS on an anycast address for under $4 a month, but I don't want to be the one maintaining it.  So I'll forward the Cloudways suggestion or alternatively suggest a premium VPS.


BTW, if anyone cares, I'm trying out a BuyVM 1GB $5/year shared hosting plan for some of my own casual stuff.  Works amazingly well for the price, but probably not the right thing for the HA application.
 
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HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Fenzox, what exactly are you offering?


HalfEatenPie, thanks, Cloudways does look interesting, but it basically looks like managed Wordpress (etc.) hosting on an underlying cloud VPS with no failover.  Am I wrong about that?


CenTex, yes, you're probably right; the site is currently with BlueHost and the host has had outages at critical moments.  SLA's where you get a month credit ($5 or whatever) for the outage isn't that helpful if the lost revenue is a lot higher than that.  Thus the quest for actual HA.


I notice DigitalOcean and others have 1-click Wordpress installs so that seems like a possibility.  OVH Cloud VPS at $9/month have this too--and they use OpenStack and Ceph so they can quickly migrate VPS between physical servers in cases of hardware failures.  But of course BHS had a day-long fiber cut recently that kept the whole data center offline for that long.  So I was hoping for HA with geographic separation.  It doesn't seem that hard to do and I'm surprised there's no affordable product like that.  I could do it with three 128MB BuyVM VPS on an anycast address for under $4 a month, but I don't want to be the one maintaining it.  So I'll forward the Cloudways suggestion or alternatively suggest a premium VPS.


BTW, if anyone cares, I'm trying out a BuyVM 1GB $5/year shared hosting plan for some of my own casual stuff.  Works amazingly well for the price, but probably not the right thing for the HA application.

I'd suggest talking with @Francisco if you're looking for anycast solutions.  He's the go-to guy for all of that things (as he's probably one of the most knowledgeable person I know).  However I don't think it'll be worth it for 20 dollars a month.  Basically 100% redundancy + basic management for 20 dollars is a tall order, don't think much people could do it properly.  Also just as a note, anycast simply directs your clients to the closest server there is.  This does not exactly mean high availability, and I don't think it should be considered as such.  If one VM goes bonkers and has a problem (e.g. apache service stopped), then your clients from that geographic region would still get an error.  Now if the entire datacenter went offline, then maybe it'd be considered part of a potential mitigation solution, however I wouldn't consider it as a proper high availability service.  


In regards to Cloudways, it is a managed wordpress hosting with a VPS.  That is if you're going the cheaper amount.  Like I said before, read their SLA term (linked).  Again, if it's something that actually generates revenue and you can't deal with down for less than an hour sometimes, then maybe 20 dollars isn't enough.  You can go with DO while using Cloudways system, which has a 99.99% uptime SLA, but if you or your friend/client really needs high availability (and it's a big BIG must), then use an AWS instance.  Seriously.  Yeah it's 40 dollars a month, but it's managed application hosting on a high availability infrastructure that's known to be reliable.  If not then simply using the cheaper DigitalOcean should be fine in itself (I think anyways).  Cloudways has their own backup system in place as well, so worst case scenario you can simply redeploy in a different location.  This is probably something you should talk with Cloudways first as I'm simply going off of reading their website.  


Maybe what you can do is a simple VestaCP instance on a cloud platform like iwStack or something and run auto-update scripts or something in a geographic location that's not susceptible to natural disasters, like maybe Dallas or Las Vegas.  Fiber cut will alway be an issue for many DCs, however I know for a fact Incero has redundant everything in their Dallas location.  Redundant power, cooling, fiber, everything.  


I don't know man, simply throwing out ideas.  Hopefully you can find a solution you're happy with and works within your budget.  For me, it seems like you're overengineering the solution.  Why not just purchase a VPS and then put a CDN on top of it?  There's always the resold OnApp CDN (TotalServerSolutions is selling 100GB of bandwidth for 9 dollars a month).  If a budget is simply 20 dollars a month, then I'd go with a high availability cloud server in a single location with a proper SLA.  
 
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graeme

Active Member
Just getting an AWS instance will not get you high availability: you need to do some work (and spend more money) to build high availability on AWS.multiple instances behind a load balancer, RDS databases with failover etc.


I have been looking for solutions to a similar problem (somewhat higher budget) and the nearest thing I have found is an OVH Cloud VPS (KVM, Open stack, storage on Ceph). There are others with similar products but in all cases (including OVH) you need to find you how well its run. It is all very well having a redundant distributed file system, or multiple SANs or whatever, but it also needs an equally reliable network, and good sys admins to keep it all running.

If a budget is simply 20 dollars a month, then I'd go with a high availability cloud server in a single location with a proper SLA.  

Agreed. There is a limit to what you can get for the money.
 
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