Hi,

I have a high traffic site and want to setup failover to another service provider since the one that I have does have issues, I want to know what's the best way to do this and any recommended software for linux

thanks

Are you talking about failover of something you're self hosting and have two ISP providers for, or are you talking about a site that's located with a datacenter and failing over to a different datacenter?

I'll assume the second case.

At the simplest you could use a service such as nodeping to get notifications that your primary site is down and manually change DNS entries to point your site anywhere when there is a failure. Set a low < 30 seconds TTL on your records to ensure they aren't cached.

If your traffic is valuable then you could consider a paid service such as Dynect who will monitor and do the IP failover / failback for you.

You will also need to consider how you are going to replicate your site and deal with failover, this can get complex if it has a database backend as you'll need to take care of replication.

I am self hosting a site on a VPS, I want to have two VPS's However I want one active and one passive. I want them with two service provider's. I want to use something like heartbeat or DRBD so that if one fails then the other takes over.

Now I know this solution needs to virtual IP, but if I have to providers How do I failover.

Hope this makes it clear

Ok, so who is hosting your DNS for your domain? You'll basically need whatever you have detecting the VPS provider failure to alter your DNS accordingly.

Your detection script would then changes the IP in the zone file, updates the serial number and then reload bind.

I think TenTenths question about the complexity of your website needs to be answered as if databases are involved then replication needs to be considered. If not then a straight synchronization between the web root between the server and some DNS change facilities implemented.............

I will be using Db on another server so that's not the issue. Since it's an active passive will do an rsync, not many changes frequently so that should not be a prob. Anyways thanks for your reply I got my answer