Our website has been down for 5 hours now. Cloudsigma is the hosting partner. They are having serious issues with their firewalls and API which renders the servers unusable.
This is during business hours in my country and needless to say many of our customers are upset as they depend on our application.
However, we are a small startup and the finances are not as strong as we'd like them to be so the question I am posing is: How would we build a fully redundant website over multiple data centers in a cost efficient way?
Anyone that has done this already and would like to share some insights?
Unfortunately that gets expensive because instead of having a single machine you suddenly need two/three/four/many.
Then you need to factor in the overhead of setting things up to work in a distributed fashion - database replication, load-balancing to route traffic, etc.
If you want to do things cheaply your best bet is to rent hosts at two locations, and have DNS handled at a third. Configure one host to be live, and leave the other one receiving constant dumps of html/db-content. In the event of the main ISP dying you switch DNS to the second - that gives you a migration time of ~5 minutes.
i.e. If budget is a concern have a hot-spare and use DNS records with very short TTL settings, so you can switch promptly.