That's interesting and probably more in line with what I need to do. It wouldn't be difficult for me to bring the entire stack online in another datacenter, but

That's interesting and probably more in line with what I need to do. It wouldn't be difficult for me to bring the entire stack online in another datacenter, but if all of your customer data resides on (for simplicity) a master SQL node in Linode-Dallas and that datacenter goes offline, how can you bring that backup node online when you can no longer access the Dallas machines? Are you suggesting to have a slave ready to become master in the 2nd datacenter? If that's the case, my main area of uncertainty is: if you promote a slave to master in a 2nd datacenter and that new master accepts writes, you then have a brutal problem of propagating writes to the old master when he comes back online. The whole thing may exceed my capability right now but I think having a disaster recovery is far better than a mirror now that I think through it.