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I have a site (www.santz.net) hosted in000webhost.

Analysing with Pingdom, I have noticed that my site has many long outages (long time periods of being down).

So the question is: can I use two hosting service provides for the same website (and using same domain)?

Like:

  • host my site here: 000webhost.com
  • and here: rvhost.com.ar
  • and to configure the Domain Name Servers (DNS) to use 2 DNS of 000webhot and 2 of rvhost
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  • This would be good to have a "backup" if one of your hosting providers are down... So vote up please! It's a inteligent and usefull question... please don't do like the guys at Stack Overflow... THIS CAN REALLY HELP LOTS OF GUYS THAT DEPEND ON FREE HOSTING SERVICES Mar 11, 2013 at 13:22
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    Serverfault is for professional system administrators et al. We don't depend on free hosting services - perhaps Super User would be a better place for this.
    – user9517
    Mar 11, 2013 at 13:28
  • What you're asking for is sort of possible, but has many limitations or extreme expense. You'll be miles ahead simply switching to one of the very cheap hosting providers (there are several at <$5 USD/mo) where you have some sort of reasonable guarantee of service.
    – Chris S
    Mar 11, 2013 at 13:40
  • @Iain as a professional admin, some orgs (non-profit ime) have an extremely low budget and can't afford premium hosting, so this has some validity. Those orgs shouldn't be denied a place on the web That being said, after I experienced what the OP did, I bit the bullet and moved my clients to the free provider's cheap solution instead, because in our case uptime was critical for a particular season, but this is not always the case.
    – MDMoore313
    Mar 11, 2013 at 13:43
  • As you need free/cheap hosting for this site, could you use google sites? sites.google.com There are various limitations, but if you could I'm sure their uptime is good :)
    – user163967
    Mar 11, 2013 at 15:12

2 Answers 2

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The reason that likely you experience those outages is because your site is hosted on a machine with other sites, and some of those other sites could be experiencing ddos attacks (speaking from experience using free hosting provider lamp networks' free hosting), since free hosting can attract questionable websites and visitors.

Not much you can do without having some backend access to both webservers. You could implement DNS round robin if you host your own dns, even then 1/2 of your visitors will have to refresh when your primary site is down. Both webservers would need static IPs, which I doubt you'll be able to get with free hosting.

Also, I don't know your dns solution, but godaddy's Total DNS Control allows you to do this per this post.

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    Those "1/2 of your visitors" would need to flush their DNS cache, or he'd have to set a crazy low TTL on his record. There are DNS "failover" schemes out there, but they're just as flaky in practice.
    – Chris S
    Mar 11, 2013 at 13:42
  • @ChrisS I agree completely, low TTLs to eliminate user actions, and round robin is not the best failover solution.
    – MDMoore313
    Mar 11, 2013 at 13:45
  • Thanks for the answer and for the comment from above. I'm actually a web site programmer and designer, and I have launched this project a month backwards, so I'm kind of a ONG that has NO budget and does depend on free website hosting services. Again, thanks for the answer Mar 11, 2013 at 14:26
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You can use round robin DNS, which is the term for what you're describing, but that just means that when one host is down, 50% of the requests will timeout. DNS isn't the solution to this problem.


You can balance a site across any number of back-end servers. You need a loadbalancer/reverse proxy to handle this. The problem is that if you aren't hosting yourself or don't have a colo for your own equipment, you'd need to outsource this load balancing just like you're outsourcing your web servers and the load balancer becomes the additional point of failure.

If a situation where people colo or self-host and really care about uptime, there are usually a pair of clustered load balancers with inbound connections from multiple ISPs feeding into them, so that you've done your best to eliminate single points of failure. Combine this with anycast and load balance clusters and servers hosted around the world in multiple datacenters, and you have some pretty good availability.

Now, of course, all of that is way overkill for you. You should probably just switch to a host that doesn't suck, but the process above is important to understand. Even if that understanding is just "way more complicated than I can afford right now."

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  • Thanks @MDMarra, I actually undersand all of this. I'm not a professional but I am quite in touch with this matters since before web site design and programming I was a networking and hardware enthusiast. Thanks a lot for the answer.... I understand what you say, but as I said I'm not a pro, so when I doubt things like this it's because I see that configs seem to allow the idea I have but I actually don't know if this kind of "tweaks" are system level allowed... Mar 11, 2013 at 14:25

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