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I have a website which is very large and has a large user-base. I am trying to think of a 'best practice' way to create a back up or mirror website, so if something happens on example.com, I can quickly point the site to backup.example.com via 401 redirect. This would give me time to troubleshoot example.com while everyone is viewing backup.example.com and not knowing the difference.

Is my method the ideal method, or have you enacted better methods to creating a backup site? I don't want to have the site go down and then get yelled at every minute while I'm trying to fix it. Ideally I would just 'flip the switch' and it would redirect the user to a backup.

masegaloeh
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Zach Smith
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  • Depending on what is 'down', you might be unable to serve a 401 from the 'old' site. Other than that, the most important (dynamic) will probably be the database, so check out database replication. – Konerak May 11 '10 at 20:59
  • 301, surely... 401 is "auth reqd", not redirect – skaffman May 11 '10 at 21:04
  • possible duplicate of [What is a ‘best practice’ backup plan for a website?](http://serverfault.com/questions/140836/what-is-a-best-practice-backup-plan-for-a-website) – l0c0b0x May 12 '10 at 05:08

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The ultimate solution is two web servers in different locations using BGP to advertise the IPs used; if the primary goes down the secondary will take its place on the same IP in a few seconds.

Depending on your needs, existing infrastructure and budget this may be ideal or impossible; can you give us a few hints regarding your web server setup and what you have to work with?

As for making the backup site this is dependent on the web technology used; it might be as simple as copy some PHP files over and set up MySQL replication, or it might be an expensive as requiring enterprise licensing for Sharepoint and MSSQL.

DrStalker
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    Two or more clusters of two or more webservers, each containing two or more disks, two or more NICs, connected to two or more switches, routers and firewalls. – Tom O'Connor Jan 05 '11 at 16:44