How to deal with uptime and redundancy issues in a shared hosting environment in coldfusion?

Question

I'm running a production service in a shared Coldfusion 10 environment. Although it is much more reliable than CF9, I still run into some issues that when they do, the live service might be down for almost a day before the techs take care of it.

What can I do on my end to prevent these downtimes? What I have done so far is to have two accounts with the same host (but different machines) pointing to the same database. If for whatever reason the production machine goes south, I login to their admin panel and route the DNS pointer to the other physical server. It's not immediate since it needs to propagate and all that, but feels faster than the unspecified amount of time the techs may take to look at the issue.

But even then, this doesn't feel like it is a professional way of handling things. So I'm up for any ideas. Unfortunately this service isn't at the point where I would get a dedicated server (since it means I'd have to pay for the CF license which is pretty pricey).

If the service you are getting is not up to par, spend your money elsewhere — Dan Bracuk, Mar 15 '13 at 02:19
find a new hosting service, a days downtime is unacceptable. — Chris Blackwell, Mar 15 '13 at 09:59
Thanks, so I ended up switching to another hosting, and as soon as I switched, THAt one gets some connectivity issues that is currently running in the couple of hours of issues. — user2172220, Apr 10 '13 at 03:13

Matt Busche · Answer 1 · 2013-03-15T02:24:08.413

I would get some logs from the host, if you can, to find out what is causing the downtime. Is there an infinite loop somewhere in your code? does the host suck? There could literally be thousands of reasons why it's crashing. If the host can't tell you why they're having issues then you need to find a new host.

As far as buying a CF license for a dedicated server, you could try out Railo or OpenBD (both are free). I've used Railo quite a bit and aside from some very minor changes I didn't have to do a lot to make the code work on Railo. If your code is mostly <cfset>, <cfquery> and <cfoutput> you should be able to make the change very easily.

Railo offers an express edition - download the zip file, unzip it and start the .bat file and you're ready to go, it really couldn't be easier to test out. If you go the Railo route and run into any issues their Google Group is very active

I'm not dev ops, so this all is beyond me, and I have a business to run, so I don't want to learn how to do all this stuff (I know, not gonna be a business around if the sites are not up - but you understand my point that if I spend the next week or two or more focused solely on getting the sites in a stable environment, the business won't run by itself. Are there any managed ColdFusion/Railo services I can tap into to set it up and manage it in the cloud? — user2172220, Apr 10 '13 at 03:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '13 at 16:11

0

Change your host, or consider getting a VPS which is usually in between shared and dedicated.

answered Mar 17 '13 at 16:11

Jas Panesar

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How to deal with uptime and redundancy issues in a shared hosting environment in coldfusion?

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