How can one achieve the cheapest yet very reliable web application configuration?
Let's assume at least 2 application servers for $80/mo plus a DB server will support most people's applications for a while - and we just want to achieve good reliability (at least 3 nines).
One can rent a pretty good VPS solution for around $80/mo right now from any reasonable provider (Amazon EC2, Slicehost, etc.). However, none of these VPS hosting solutions are perfect, and I've experienced more than 99.9% downtime with each of them.
I'm not sure how best to configure these 3 machines - the best would be to put the two app servers on different providers (best with different network connections) and use HAProxy to keep an eye on each other. If one fails, it will update the DNS to remove it from the pool of IP addresses for your application. But what to do about the DB server? That's still a single point of failure.
I have had issues with DNS in the past, but this can be handled by an external dedicated provider like DNS Made Easy for very cheap ($15/year). This supports dynamically modifying DNS entries if necessary as well, which is handy if you're not planning on being able to update them manually during a crisis.
Backups should be done to an external source (S3 or FTP site) at least once per day - again a minimal each month. You need an automated deploy and restore script in order to get past 3 nines I think from your backup as well.
I don't quite feel like this is quite there due to the DB availability, but it'll cost you around $80x3 + disk space + DNS = $250/mo.
Can one do better?
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