Mirroring your website when host goes down

Anyone have a link to a good tutorial or explanation on how to do this?

Basically say I host with hostgator.. when their server is down, I would like for it to load my website from a different host. I believe this is possible via the nameservers you set.. but I'm not positive how it's setup, or how to make sure it's a replica copy of your website. If this is costly and/or difficult to setup. At least having it redirect to another host with just 1 page setup that explains the downtime, and still have the ability to create a few static pages with info about your website until the other host comes back up would be useful.

Thanks.

I guess you can do it very basically by having your site set up on another host, then you have your DNS on a third party DNS manager, and you just change the DNS entries to the other host - takes a few hours max to propogate tehse days, then you're good to go.

But you would have to manually sync the sites every time they changed - unless you had some sort of shell script that synced from the master site to the slave site on a daily basis.

Not sure if its possible to have multiple A records set up and configure TTL so it will try the second host of the first has no response??

Would be interested to hear opinions from any experts on this.

You would have some problems to host your site like this.
first of all you need to manually sync all files.
you may have two or more A records , using multiple A records will give you a round robin system but which will not have priority.

For example you may have

www host1
www host2

like this customer who try to navigate your site will randomly go to host1 or host2.
what you can do is once host1 go down for example to delete this A record. You will surely need some hours for dns to propagate ( from my personal experience godaddy has quickest dns)

the best solution is to go for cloud hostin gin one company. It is rare all cloud to go down. Try to find a comoany that offers good SLA.

THANKS
TEO

I found this: http://rsync.samba.org/

Unfortunately, I don't have much knowledge of linux, and normally just use shared hosting. But, I guess it would be possible if you were hosting from a VPS or dedi where you could install such things.

I will read up on cloud hosting some as well.

Sorry for double posting but forgot to mention that this can become with hardware.

you will need a load balancer to achieve this which will split traffic across host1 and host2.
Once any host goes down will drive traffic to online host

Of course the also bad with a implementation like this is that you have again single point of failure (load balancer)

This is easy and free with Cloudflare (with their always online technology). Cloudflare has many disadvantages though. Read the negatives (google it please) and decide if you would want to continue with them...

By the way, if you have a payment gateway that you need to take care of, then I can't guarantee you success with CF...