Following the early June Server Farm fire and subsequent down time here is a follow up on the progress so far and short terms plans.
The new server in the UK is nearly ready for production and to become the primary server, this will have a impact on server response as there are fewer nodes to go through to reach UK/EU customer base.
However this will be very minimal gains and US, rest of the world visitors will not see a difference. I will also operate a fail over policy for dns, emails and websites:
All websites will be synchronised on an daily basis between the 2 servers, in case of lasting downtime from the UK server, we will be able to reverse to the US server within hours (the time it will take to manually change the DNS records)
For email service, the UK server will handle emails. However, as email is a bit more resilient than websites in a way that if emails cannot be delivered they will be queued until they can, a fail over is less critical.
I am currently experimenting with the possibility of having the two servers able to receive the same email message, if one is not working, the other should. This would require having two email accounts for the same address and access these two accounts using the IP address of the mail server instead of the domain name, it is fairly technical and needs to be tested for feasibility first.
As for DNS, I will also have more than one name server (ie phone book) as DNS protocol require at least one of these to minimise interruption, I will have the record stored in 6 name servers located in different locations. The websites will be unreachable only if the Internet goes entirely down.