we are developing a kind of payment processing site that is currently running on IIS and SQL Server at a shared hosting company.
The problems we have include that the web hosting company sometimes breaks down and is unavailable. Last month it was unavailable for several days due to flooding. Sometimes the network was unreachable. Sometimes someone else on the same server ran something, we were told, that prevented our stuff from running correctly.
The downtime costs us customers, customer and job satisfaction, and of course money.
Scalability is not an issue at this time. Reliability is.
If we do not want to worry about hosting and running the servers and network ourselves, what is the best way to achieve high(er) availability?
How do we set up a hosting solution that will work?
Thanks,
If you are running your business on this stuff you should be paying for a dedicated box in a data center. They cost about $150 a month for a crappy one but that is probably far better than what you have now. These boxes will also let you do a lot more than a shared host will often times allow such as running email servers, running your own DNS and you’ll have a lot more bandwidth.
You could even get two of these boxes at different hosts and then you’d have redundancy in case one data center ever went down.
If your boss has trouble with the price difference, just explain how much downtime costs the business and how much they are paying you and your team to build this stuff. Then as a percentage of that the cost for a server is fairly insignificant.