Hi,

I've got a busy website that needs an improvement in speed and redundancy. I think co-location can work for me, but I'm not sure my understanding is correct. My understanding is I can do the following -

- co locate vps - one in Oz and one in US.
- US traffic can then us the US server, OZ traffic can use the Oz server, therefore load balancing
- if one fails over, the other takes up the slack
- website/databases are replicated (I have a forum on the website ... does this matter? )

Is this all possible?

thanks!

Hello,

What exactly do you mean by colocate VPS?

Colocation usually means you bring your own server to the DC and we install it to work on our network.

As for having the one VPS sharing data between US and OZ I am not sure if that is possible, is that correct on what you are trying to achieve?

You may have to explain in a bit more detail?

Hi, see I think my understand is wrong! lol
What I was thinking was if I had a vps in US and a vps in OZ, both running the same website, I could somehow sync and load balance them... much like raid1 on a hdd does. Is this possible?

You maybe able to complete such a procedure though im sure you would have to do it yourself. As a hosting company that offer VPS servers wouldnt offer support.

you would need to set up some form of DNS geolocation trickery.

DNS servers redirect traffic to the server closest to the persons physical location

Yes you would have to setup some kind of DNS redirections, or alternatively use us.site.com and au.site.com and redirect to each site based on IP location. Secondly DB replication can be tough - what kinda of DB software will you be using?

ok.

Am using mysql 5

thanks.

What are you trying to achieve in the end? I ask as the problem will have been faced before and resolved by most of the hosts using this forum.

MySQL 5 replication is a breeze. (Just make sure you use auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset appropriately on the two servers)

File system replication is a bit more difficult - perhaps consider using a utility called "unison" which works great (Depends how much data you're talking about but anything sub-20GB should run fine on any VPS)

With the Geo DNS - use someone who already does it. It'll give you too many headaches to "roll your own".

Lastly on redundancy - If you're lucky you might find a Geo DNS provider who can do this for you automatically upon detecting when your site is down. Else you'er going to have to come up with some other way of changing the DNS appropriately