Thank you for the response, Adam. I agree that a poorly implemented high-availability solution can introduce more problems than it solves.
I also want to emphasize that Enhance’s existing disaster recovery features are already excellent. The ability to decommission a failed server, restore websites to another machine, and update DNS automatically is far beyond what is normally available in other hosting panels. It already provides a very strong layer of protection against a complete server loss.
The issue is that there are situations where restoring from backups, even when the process works perfectly, is not fast enough.
A recent example was a Linux kernel vulnerability that required servers to be updated and rebooted. Consider an operation with approximately 50 VPSs—in my business model, each customer purchases a VPS to host their websites. Rebooting all of these machines inevitably causes downtime for many customers.
Restoring backups to other servers would not be a practical solution in this scenario. The process could take several hours because of the number of VPSs, the amount of data, and the time required to provision the destinations, restore the backups, and validate each environment. There could also be some loss of changes made after the most recent backup.
This is exactly where a standby server with failover would be extremely valuable. During a critical update, planned maintenance, or unexpected failure, services could be temporarily redirected to another synchronized server. Once the primary server had recovered, traffic could be moved back in a controlled manner.
As far as I know, none of the major hosting control panels currently offers a complete and integrated failover solution. If Enhance implemented this, it would be a major competitive advantage and would further strengthen its position as a modern platform for hosting providers.
I do not think this needs to be a standard feature included in every plan. Because of the complexity involved in synchronization, replication, and monitoring, it could be offered as a paid add-on. Many hosting providers—and probably their customers—would be willing to pay more for an official high-availability solution.
The current disaster recovery system is an excellent solution for recovering after a failure. Failover would add another layer: keeping services available while the failure or maintenance is taking place.
