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.
