The SurvivalBlog Mirror Site Project

It troubled me to read news reports about the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, S.773. If enacted, the US President could declare a “cybersecurity emergency” and then would have the power to shut down the Internet in the U.S. and the Secretary of Commerce would have access to data, regardless of privacy. Soon after, I read this headline: Obama Plans Internet Grab: FCC to Embrace ‘Net Neutrality’. Needless to say, this could have some “negative implications.”

As some one who values redundancy in contingency planning, I believe that the time has come for me to set up one or two mirror sites for SurvivalBlog, just in case my blog somehow gets “disappeared.” Ideally, a mirror site would be housed on a server in a Second World country with few ties (economic or political) to the United States. I’d like to set up one or two full mirrors, each with unique domain names. This would be automagically backed up daily. We are currently housed using Apache on Linux, with a dedicated server. Once a mirror is established, I’d ask all SurvivalBlog readers to bookmark it, but not regularly use the mirror site, in order to limit the bandwidth, and to retain ease of click-through tracking for our advertisers . (They need to know that they are getting their money’s worth, for their advertising dollars.) Does anyone have suggestions for a reliable high bandwidth offshore web host? (Our current bandwidth is over 1terabyte per month, and likely to double in the next year.) Or do you have any recommendations on automatic mirroring software? Thanks.