How to create an affordable web application

Question

Suppose we are going to create a web application in which high availability is the main focus. Our customers are companies, so downtime is equal to loss of income for all participants.

To summarize, we must constantly be online so that everyone is happy. So, from a very simple point of view , what methods should be sought for this?

We have almost no preferences, except that we will use PHP to increase the speed of work, therefore we are completely open for new storage platforms and what else is there to make this happen.

Your answer is greatly appreciated! Many thanks!

Answer 1

To do this, you need to consider both hardware and software.

As far as hardware is concerned, it is best to choose a hosting provider with the necessary experience, for example, Rackspace (I have good personal experience with them, but there are many others). It will not be cheap. You will need completely redundant equipment in order to survive in the event of failure of any one component - several servers (at least two), each with several disks, network cards, fans, power supplies - you get an image.

For software, make sure you build it with scalability in mind. If this is your web application that uses the MVC paradigm and ensures clean separation, it will be of great importance so that you can scale your application on several servers that you need to run.

The hardest part is usually the database, because you cannot just run two. Therefore, take a look at the master-slave setup with automatic failover or even with a cluster.

Several books are available for this topic, here is only one of them . Good luck

Answer 2

There are several ways to resolve this issue, depending on many variables:

• go with a hosted solution
• redundant virtual machine deployment
• use load balancing
• RAID array

All of these combinations can help you.

If you decide to go with a hosted solution, you will still want to make some of your own backups if your host works and you need to recover. If you deployed virtual machines, you can also provide some load balancing and prepare virtual machines if the components fall.

Answer 3

Plenty of redundancy, down to several data centers, if you cannot afford to opt out.

Answer 4

You can also watch various cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. Then you can pay only for what you need ...

See also:

http://www.2mhost.com/mission-critical-web-hosting.html

http://www.ihostxtremes.com/

http://www.netlocations.com/

http://www.mewebhost.com/

Answer 5

I personally recommend the Azure App Service (which is a PaaS solution for building web applications).

Also consider the following universal / isomorphic kit for beginner web applications: https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit (disclaimer: I'm the author)