Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiberius_p | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to have like a backup cloud solution in case my electricity goes down at home and my self hosted server shuts down? Some cloud service that does nothing most of the time except backing up data from the self hosted server from time to time and monitoring if it's up and connected to the internet, and if it's not then it takes over and offers the same service.

View on HN

Not that I'm aware of. You'd need to run a reverse proxy somewhere and then point it to your home server as a default but having your other server as a backup running the software at the same time. The big problem is how to store the data on both servers at the same time, especially small texts which are in the database.

Thinking out loud here, but if this is public-facing you can put together a static archive using something like ArchiveBox/SingleFile and have the monitoring server serve the files and update the DNS entry when it detects downtime past a certain threshold.

I don't think a static Mastodon or Lemmy is very useful. For PeerTube that might be something to consider.

Sure, it won't offer exactly the same affordance but the OP mentioned rare downtimes like electricity going out (rare here is used generously, obviously some places see this happen often).

Providing a read-only, static version of the services, particularly toots and blog posts, while the origin is unreachable is straightforward and inexpensive.

Somewhat related, the Solar Protocol [0] does something like this to host websites across an array of solar-powered servers across the globe. http://solarprotocol.net/

With the new HTTPS DNS records you could point to the backup server with a lower priority; no need to update the DNS!

Can you link me to some further info on this?

See RFC 9460; discussion here from a few days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420555>

Also: <https://www.netmeister.org/blog/https-rrs.html>

How often does your power cut out unexpectedly and how bad is that for you and your website?

For me in the Netherlands, maybe 2 years ago my power cut out for an hour IIRC. Pretty reliable, good enough for my website to be just as available.

Point being: is it worth the effort to have a backup in that circumstance?

Why not just use the hosted server all the time at that point?

Cost? Spin it up when the local server goes down, spin it down when it comes back up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com