Reducing Downtime During Backups

[Eric Pretorious]

I've noticed that enabling the "Suspend domains until backup task is completed" feature causes lots of downtime during backups and that affects our SLA.

[Aside from the obvious impact on availability] What are the advantages and disadvantages to suspending the domains during backups? Are there any good reasons to leave this setting enabled?

 

[abdi]

The fear of not suspending is that you might miss out some data in the backups (especially if the changes took place during or after backup task). Thus suspending the domain, creates a full backup of the site as was before suspending.

I personally don't recommend enabling the suspend domain option...(The difference in data if it's there is really negligible, compared to the downtime)

 

[Eric Pretorious]

Is there some way to make the site unavailable by [temporarily] redirecting visitors to a different URL during the backup (instead of canceling DNS for the entire domain)? This would be much better for the SLA than completely shutting off all services for the domain...

 

[abdi]

Sure, just add the code below to your index.php file of that domain name ...

<?php

   header( 'Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html' ) ;

?>

Change http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html to the new URL you want to redirect to!

 

[Eric Pretorious]

Is there some way to make the site unavailable by [temporarily] redirecting visitors to a different URL during the backup (instead of canceling DNS for the entire domain)? This would be much better for the SLA than completely shutting off all services for the domain...

Sure, just add the code below to your index.php file of that domain name ...

<?php

   header( 'Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html' ) ;

?>

Change http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html to the new URL you want to redirect to!

How would I configure Plesk to do that as part of the backup process, Abdi?

 

[abdi]

From plesk you can use URL redirector ...
You can also use mod_rewrite (.htaccess) to redirect ...
You can also use DNS (CNAME) records ...

If it's just temporary, then DO NOT USE PLESK's URL forwarder ...You might cause un-necessary problems if you already have data on your domain name ..