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I currently run a web application on a single VPS but have the need to make it redundant so that the website will not become unavailable in case the server goes down for any reason.

I have found that NLB (Network Load Balancing) could get the job done and the load balancing would be a great bonus. A problem I would run into with this is the storage of the files uploaded to the server by clients but for that it seems DFS (Distributed File System) could make the servers share these files and also replicate them for backup which would be another great bonus.

Now to my question. My hosting provider has two data centers so I was thinking it might be a good idea to place the two VPS's at different locations to minimize the risk of them both being affected by a failure at the same time. But is this possible or do the nodes have to be in the same local network for NLB/DFS?

And a thing that came to mind is since these VPS's are "in the cloud" anyway which means I don't know where they are how could I know they were on the same local network even if they were in the same data center?

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  • NLB must be over the local subnet as it uses multicast. Software like haproxy is better for datacenter-style failover. DFS is a complicated beast and I don't even think this works without an AD domain.
    – Nathan C
    May 22, 2014 at 17:38
  • @NathanC Ok. What about a VLAN? If I have understood correctly it can be set up spanning different physical locations but would it create the necessary environment for NLB/DFS?
    – Vik
    May 22, 2014 at 18:34
  • VLANs won't work either as they're usually for local networks. A VPN is the best way to link two networks together. The rest is up to you.
    – Nathan C
    May 22, 2014 at 19:17

1 Answer 1

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I have decided to use my hosting provider's hardware load balancing service and set up DFS over VPN. In my case this load balancing service is slightly cheaper than setting up two other VPS's with software load balancing (HAProxy or Application Request Routing).

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