Last week we launched the new GearHost and walked through the new customer portal in a blog post. This week we recorded it. The video follows a real account through Octane, from creating a site to turning on High Availability.
Below the video, we explain how that works: what High Availability does, and why GearHost can run your site almost anywhere.
Jump to a part
- 0:00 The dashboard
- 0:14 Create a CloudSite
- 0:33 Your site, files and FTP
- 0:58 Deploy from AI Publish, GitHub, Git push or CI
- 1:36 High Availability zones
- 2:07 Watch HA reroute traffic
- 2:58 Domains, DNS and backups
- 3:31 Support, billing and team access
- 3:54 Settings and feature requests
Why one server is a problem
Most hosting works the same way. Your website lives on one server in one data center. If that server has a hardware failure, a bad update or a network problem, your site goes down with it, and it stays down until someone fixes that one machine. Your visitors get an error page, and you usually hear about it from them.
What High Availability does
High Availability runs your site in more than one place at the same time. We call each place a zone. GearHost keeps your files and database in sync between the zones and sends every visitor to one that is healthy. If a zone goes down, traffic moves to the others on its own. Nobody has to wake up, open a ticket or flip a switch, and your visitors never see the outage.
You turn it on from your site's page in Octane. Click Deploy High Availability, choose your zones, and confirm. That is it. There is no rebuilding your site and no migration. At 1:36 in the video you can see a site's zones on the map.
Why we say we can host anywhere
A zone does not have to be one of our servers. It can be our Denver data center, a public cloud like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or even a server at your own office. That works because GearHost runs its own agent on every server it manages, so the same site can run on our hardware and in the cloud at the same time.
That means your uptime does not rest on one company. If a cloud provider has a bad day, the zone in our data center keeps serving your site. If our data center has a bad day, the cloud zone does. And you do not need your own AWS or Azure account or have to learn their tools. You pick the zones in Octane and we handle the rest.
If you would rather try it than read about it, the demo on our home page lets you take a zone offline and watch the traffic move. It is also at 2:07 in the video.
What it costs
High Availability is an add-on, so you only pay for it on the sites that need it. Prices are on the plans page. The Hobby plan is free and does not need a credit card, so you can build your site first and add High Availability when uptime starts to matter.
Already host with us? Nothing changes until we email you about your move, and you keep signing in at my.gearhost.com until then. Want High Availability sooner? Email support@gearhost.com and we will move you early.