Alex Aminoff wrote: > My suggestion: get 2 of the cheapest residential connections you can > find and set up a router to switch between them as one or the other is > down.
Reliability of the connection is not a top concern. I think the area ISPs have a pretty good track record in that respect, and for those offering both commercial and business class service, the low-end commercial infrastructure is largely the same, and thus no better or worse. Using more consumer-grade connections just means dealing with more arcane port blocking rules, bandwidth cap policies, and clueless support people. That's not to say having a backup service isn't a good idea. Perhaps using the least restrictive consumer-grade service as a fallback. Though even at $50/moth it may be hard to justify the cost. You're paying $600/year as insurance against down time. That might be worth it (depending on what lost business will cost you) if you consider the worse case scenario: multiple days of down time from your existing provider, and multiple days of lead time to get a replacement service. (A middle ground might be to have a "warm spare." Get a backup provider installed, and test it for a few months, then shut it down. Chances are good that if you need it, it could be brought up with just a phone call and less than 8 hours of delay.) If you wanted to do this, I have seen support for multiple WAN connections added to open source router firmware, like Tomato USB, and likely readily available for anything higher-end. > You asked about static IPs however. That is thornier. You could probably > rig up something with 2 bad providers as I suggested using dynamic DNS... Yes, but as Rich noted about his setup, anything I'd consider self-hosting could tolerate some down time. Rich Braun wrote: > One of the earlier suggestions was to run a pair of connections for > improved outage resilience, but unless you go full-on BGP I don't think > you'll achieve it for inbound services... That's my understanding as well, with some exceptions: 1. if you are self-hosting a web app, and having a "man in the middle" isn't a privacy concern, you can front it with a proxy residing in the cloud, 2. you could use a monitoring service that does fail-over in DNS (probably what Alex was getting at), 3. use the VPN tunnel model, with the VPN end-point being public, so if the primary link dies, you just reconnect the VPN on the backup. -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting." http://www.theperlshop.com/ _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
