Hi. I am IT manager/developer for a small organization. I have been doing as-needed linux server administration for several years and am by no means an expert. I've built several of my own servers, and our org is currently using hosting services for our servers and I am relatively happy.
We recently had an outage at the host, and management has made clear that this is unacceptable. Our host is one of the larger ones, a publicly traded company, and their techs are onsite and knowledgeable. The outage was a problem with the pipe between the hosting company and the backbone to the internet, caused by the hosting company's pipe provider. It lasted about 25 minutes. Just FYI.
So the conversation about redundancy and clusters has begun. I have never done this before. My hosting company offers a cluster plan that would be easy to implement (CPanel based) but that won't solve the problem of a pipe outage. We are thinking of clustered web servers (apache, php) and clustered databases (mysql) in different locations geographically. Wha are the considerations involved? Rough idea of costs, risks that remain, etc.
Any direction would be really appreciated.