Achieving Five Nines

My rule-of-thumb for clients is: two nines you get for free (ie, without spending anything specifically on high availability). Every extra nine increases total cost by up to an order of magnitude.

That is to say, you can have 99% uptime by just putting your application on a half-decent server on your corporate internet connection. To improve on that, you can colocate. You can colocate with load-balancing and fast failover. You can colocate with load-balancing, fast failover, and a cold spare DR site. You can colocate with load-balancing, a hot spare site, PI address space, run your own ASN and have BGP peering arrangements in place to ensure that your address space is always globally-routable. You can investigate high-availability hardware, where everything including memory and CPUs can be quiesced and hot-swapped. If your application supports it, you can run fully-distributed hosting, or outsource to the highly-available content provision networks. You can, and will, need five times as many staff to manage all this 24*365, including holidays and sickness cover, and the frequent live DR tests you will need to do to have confidence in all of this.

You can do lots of clever stuff. But it all costs, and most of it costs a very large amount of money.

So my sincere advice is: work out what it'd cost you to host your app on a single server in the corporate office. If your employer isn't willing to spend up to a thousand times as much as that, forget five-nines; it's not realistic.

If five nines was easy, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Azure and Amazon would probably already be there. They definitely have the money and most valid business cases for it. Instead, I would recommend you aim for hosting with a cloud provider who has the expertise in providing reliable infrastructure so that they can worry about this while you develop your product.

For five nines, you're looking at a lot more involvement than just one failover solution. You need HA within one datacenter plus a hot (or at least warm) standby datacenter that's geographically far but topologically near your primary data center. And that's just the start...