What are the essential skills, knowledge etc. you should have if you're going to colocate?

I'm sick of being let down by dedicated providers and am thinking of just colocating but don't want to find out afterwards it isn't for me.

The plan is to have several boxes with IP failover so even if a couple of them fail, I will still have my site up. This means trips to the DC will be minimised and I've got just about enough experience to keep the servers up to date and configured as I need them. Anything else I will find a company to remote admin them if I need it.

I'll keep spare hardware here or in the DC for if anything fails. Maybe even a spare server or two.

What haven't I thought of?

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Registered User

Looking to the future...advice

Read through Jamie's post and mine. That probably covers the most of it.

If you want to have several boxes then you can either just get a load balancer and sync your files across them or just use heartbeat or something similar and have them fail over. It's a bit more complex if you need to manage your databases depending on the technology. (mysql is easy, mssql not so much)

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Mooharr
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These are not my views and i cannot be held accountable for anything he says.

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Web Host - VIP Member

That apart from a powerlead and a cat5 cable with internet connectivity *everythig* else is going to be your issue to deal with.

Sounds like your selection criteria need some work How did you pick the dedicated providers you have tried ? And what are you running on these servers ?

In mst cases you wont just be able to keep things at the DC if you're a *colo* customer, for that you'd need soem plastic boxes and your own rack ...

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Web Host - VIP Member

Why are you so sick of dedicated providers? what issues have you had?

Regards

Charlie

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Web Host - Certified Member

It's taken me over a year to implement what you are looking for (OK it was only me but hey).

You need to carry out lots of reading and asking..

For failover you may want to consider VirtualIron + an iSCSI SAN to keep costs at a minimum..

Oh, and I'm still not fully redundant or in production as yet....

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Registered User

HaProxy + GlusterFS + Ucarp = Job done

Apart from DB replication but that's never straightforward

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Registered User

HaProxy is very nice Recently been testing it in place of a hardware load balancer. It's doing a huge number of connections with very minimal hardware!

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Mooharr
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These are not my views and i cannot be held accountable for anything he says.

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Registered User