[cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very Vocal Hosting Customer

["Jerry Farquhar" <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Currently have a customer that is very vocal and they are wanting to know
what can be done to prevent any kind of outage for their email and web
sites.

They have 2 sites and close to 100 users total.  The major activity is
email.

We have been hosting them on one of our Raq3/4's for nearly 3 years now and
do to recent hardware failure problem about a month+ ago they want to find
out the expense and requirements to ensure 100% guarantee of service 100% of
the time.

Personally I think they are ridiculous and it is going to cost them a lot
more than they bargained for.  Any way I looking for feed back from anyone
with suggestions as to what is:

a.) The most practical approach
b.) The most cost effective approach
c.) The easiest to manage


Here is what they are wanting:
==============================

Scenario 1:
-----------
Primary web & email fails
(it could be a result of either hardware or software problem)

Desire is to have a second server pick up immediately without any disruption
or loss of web site content or email functionality and that employees and
visitors would be oblivious to any failure at any time.

Scenario 2:
-----------
Same as Scenario 1 but also includes no disruption even in the even of a ISP
or Internet provider outage.

FYI - This part seems simple enough to accomplish by having a backup server
hosted at a different location on a different ISP's backbone.  The overall
problem I see is synchronizing the servers web content and email so that
there would be ZERO disruption or user required changes.


I'm all ears as to ideas and suggestions..

FYI - This customer is anything but tech savvy so the simpler the solution
the better.

Jerry
Net Wise Solutions