Does anyone have any tips they’d like to share in terms of a strategy you use for handling site outages? We had a networking hardware failure which took our site and most of our online services down for a few hours yesterday.
How do others handle this? What contingency plans do you have in place?
Hey Brian,
Hopefully some customers with direct experience can chime in with any tips or preferences that they may have, but I know a number of CM1 users have implemented hardware or software load balancer / failover configurations for their web server layer.
Essentially, they publish out to a primary web server from CM1, and then an automated data replication tool such as Robocopy or rsync replicates the site’s content onto a second web server. The load balancer in front of these two web servers uses round-robin logic to divert visitors to either server, and if one of the servers goes down, that server it taken out of the pool until the issue has been corrected.
Because I know you rely on our DTS components (auto-lists, etc.), you would also want to reconfigure your DTS Tomcat to connect to a single external database server (MySQL, SQL Server) so that both servers are talking back to the same database and outputting the same content (Configure DTS to an External Database).