If you have money and experience then you can go as far as buying all server equipment required, in which case you will also be responsible for all server maintenance costs.

The other option could be leasing a server as this will be cheaper than buying server, but here as well you are responsible for all maintenance and running costs of server.

In above two cases you also need to make sure that you have multiple connections with hosting company so there are no complications in case a connection goes down.

Upside

The best thing about being a reseller is that you do not require a lot of upfront investment.

There is no need to have a lot of technical knowledge. Account management and Internet skills are all that is required. However, it would be really handy if you have some sales and marketing experience so you can interact with your customers better.

The hosting company generally provides and maintains all hardware and software.

You do not need to hire a lot of IT staff to provide support. Providing basic support and leaving more technical issues to parent company support staff can be easily achieved. Downside

Support can sometimes be delayed, as you are dependent on parent company to handle technical aspects. If there is a delay from their side then you along with your customer are affected.

Sometimes customers leave you if they find out that you are a reseller and not a real hosting company.

Tips for marketing yourself

If you are starting out on a small scale then visiting message boards and posting your services there is a good idea. A lot of potential clientele with relatively small hosting needs also frequent message boards and outline their desired services.

Having contests is a great idea for bringing awareness and interest about your services.

Online ad campaigns, signatures, and text links are very helpful techniques.

Once you have gotten a bigger budget then you can go for Google ad words or PPC search engines.

The best strategy is to try out various combinations of these approaches and work out best one for your needs.

One of inherent difficulties with failover for Web Hosting companies operating on different networks is limitations imposed by DNS caching system.

As DNS records are passed from original DNS servers (i.e., ns1/ns2.your-domain.com), they are cached or stored at several different ISP’s along way. Which is why it takes a while for a newly registered domain name to resolve to its IP address.

Each DNS record has a TTL (time to live) setting assigned. By manipulating this value, it is possible to alter how long that particular IP address/ DNS record combo is stored. If your site is on 2 different servers with 2 different IP addresses, you could set ‘time to live’ with a value of, say, 2 minutes.

The failover software would check server availability by “pinging” web server every few minutes to determine whether it’s IP address is responding appropriately. (perhaps by looking for a particular text string in a web page).

If a failure is detected, then software would pull non-working web server IP address out of list of IP addresses assigned to your web site’s domain name. If/when your web server IP comes back online it would be restored to list.

With a TTL setting of 2 minutes, theoretically, your web site should be down for just 2 minutes, while switching DNS information to other web server.

The problem with this scenario, is that, while some ISP’s caching might respond to such low figures, other ISP’s may decide to ignore,(to save on bandwidth utilization), any TTL’s below a certain value, say, 60 minutes. So it is entirely possible that some of your visitors would see your websites and for others, your site would be down for 1 hour or more, even though one of your servers was operating perfectly.

Static non interactive web sites are great candidates for server clustering, but wicket becomes a bit sticky for dynamically generated sites. Most database application software in general, although having some replication capabilities, are not happy with multiple server master/slave relationships and real time updating between servers. The issue can become very problematic if your site requires frequent updates.

Then there is problem of how to keep your websites synchronized. Unix/Linux servers have a built in synchronizing software tool called rsync. You can also automate synchronizing process by setting up a cron job to run periodically. DNS caching and synchronizing issues can be so problematic so as to nullify advantages of server clustering. For example, a cron job to synchronize your servers every few minutes might very well use up your server capacity.

Your customers will also have to contend with their desktop email client software having dual email addresses for each email account on each web server. e.g. info@server1.net, info@server2.net.

It is important to realize that DNS operates by default in a round robin manner, so that, if you have same web site on 2 separate servers, it is very likely that server 1 will get 50% of all web traffic.

Now, this is important for a number of reasons, but one of principal reasons to keep this in mind, is that, you will not be able to effectively keep a ”back-up” site (as some providers would have you believe) which will only be used when primary server goes down. For e.g. a site saying” we’re sorry our main server is down but you may contact us at: www.yourdomain2.com.

On a final note, hardware based load balancing solutions tend to be quite expensive and also introduce a potential single point of failure into system, load balancer itself. There is a very prominent Data Center that began offering load balanced hosting solutions, where load balancer itself failed on several occasions, although web servers were operating perfectly. The net effect to public however, was that sites were unavailable.

Reasonable cost effective software based solutions may be obtained as a service model or by purchasing software yourself. Zoneedit is an example of a service model, and Simplefailover is an example of a software based model which maybe purchased on a server license basis.

In conclusion, at this point in time, there are several limiting factors to successfully implementing a “true” high availability multiple server web hosting system. Depending on your clientele and nature of their web sites,this may indeed be a very viable alternative. For others, simply setting up a server with high quality components, redundant RAID hard drives and a good supply of server spare parts may be best way to ensure high availability.