"Never"?... Really!?...
I'll cover my "never go down" statement right now... "Never" is a definitive word. Certainly nothing guarantee-able by me or anyone else, but I can say with confidence it would be extremely unlikely for the set of failures to simultaneously occur that would take this load balanced website offline.
Is this easy and cheap?
"No" and "yes". I've spent months searching, investigating, trying, failing, building, failing, rebuilding, rebuilding and ultimately learning how to build the most highly available website possible and to do so on a tight budget. That last part is the big trick of course. If you have tens of thousands of dollars laying around getting dusty, you could easily recreate and surely exceed the performance of this setup using expensive racks of servers and network appliances. The website setup I'm going to show you how to build here costs nothing for the software if you choose not to donate or purchase support plans. However, I do recommend purchasing and/or donating whatever you can afford to support the software developers. The server/VPS hosting for this setup has zero setup fees and costs less than $50 per month total to keep it running. Intrigued? It's not a simple process but you can do this if you're willing to invest some time and effort.
