Are multiple data centers required for high availability with Digital Ocean

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your question. I wanted to address the specific questions that you brought up first:

1. Failover to generator backup was never tested and failed when needed All of the Datacenters we use always test their failover to generator backups, this is part of their certification process. However, with anything physical there is always a set of circumstances that can occur that can cause an issue. In all of our years in business we only had one facility that was affected when a backup generator failed to go online and this was at our NYC1 facility about three years ago. This caused a ten minute outage.

The issue here was that there was a planned power maintenance in this facility, which is actually unusual for a Datacenter, and there was a human error involved which caused the failure.

We have had no other issues and with any of our datacenters since that one.

2. Multiple network carriers on the same fiber, which ended up being cut. This is not a possibility as we have multiple carriers on different fiber, that also take different entry points in to each of our datacenter buildings. Even if you have multiple fiber connections but they take the same physical entry point into a building you can have a cable cut occur. By using two separate physical entry points into each building we minimize for this situation as both would need to experience a fiber cut at the same time to cause an outage.

3. a DNS disaster I don’t even want to get into In the past several years DNS has become an attack vector where many DDoS attacks attempt to exploit how DNS operates and to amplify their attack. It is also a common target for DDoS attacks as well. We have many layers to mitigate DDoS attacks unfortunately no one is completely immune from them as the attacks are constantly evolving. What you want to look for with DNS issues is frequency and time to resolution. The reason for that is that each time there is a service impacting event the amount of time it takes to recover obviously is critical for your business, but also because it is possible to continue to harden systems against attacks.

This is an area in which we are constantly investing given that business continuity for our customers is paramount.

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In general you as @hansen has pointed out you want to be distributed against multiple geographic regions and can even go so far as to distribute against multiple providers. The challenge is of course that the more highly available and distributed your system becomes the more complex it is manage. It is also possible that as you add in layers of complexity you may suffer more downtime or interruptions of service from a mis configuration of high availability rather than the potential for incurred downtime otherwise. So it is a tricky balance.

It sounds like you’ve made some great steps already so I would recommend running with the current implementation and seeing how things go for you. As always if there are any issues please contact our support department and they will always do their best to provide the most up to date and important information to you, should there be an issue.

Thanks!