Have you ever experienced an unscheduled downtime on your website? You know, like during a heavy sale, or when a client's visiting? It’s pretty traumatic, isn’t it? This is why redundancy and failover systems are key in dedicated hosting environments; they try to ensure your website stays live, even if something fails.
One way to think about this would be if one light turned off, another one immediately turns on. This philosophy is how it keeps your website live, even if something is going on in the background.
Here’s how redundancy and failover help ensure 24/7 uptime for your site:
• No downtime: Your site is up all the time.
• More reliability: If one server goes down, another will take over seamlessly.
• Automatic remediation: The systems manage problems without intervention.
• More trust: Customers have less anxiety when they always see your site working.
Those guarantees of 99.99% uptime by large hosting companies are possible because the redundancy and failover systems keep things running behind the scenes with less human intervention than previous models.
A Real Example
One of my friends has an online store that uses a hosted service. During a sale, one of the servers went down. Normally that would mean lost revenue, and very upset customers. The host, however, relies on a model of load balancing and automatic failover, so another server took over immediately and everything continued. The customers were not even aware.
That is what strong planning looks like.
What Are Redundancy And Failover?
To make this intuitive, redundancy refers to having additional backups pre-paid, like extra servers, power or internet connection, etc. Failover means if the primary system stops functioning, it'll immediately switch over to the redundant systems.One way to think about this would be if one light turned off, another one immediately turns on. This philosophy is how it keeps your website live, even if something is going on in the background.
Why Hosting Companies Implement These Systems
So why do companies who host websites to so much effort to implement these systems, you may ask? That answer is easy: uptime.Here’s how redundancy and failover help ensure 24/7 uptime for your site:
• No downtime: Your site is up all the time.
• More reliability: If one server goes down, another will take over seamlessly.
• Automatic remediation: The systems manage problems without intervention.
• More trust: Customers have less anxiety when they always see your site working.
Those guarantees of 99.99% uptime by large hosting companies are possible because the redundancy and failover systems keep things running behind the scenes with less human intervention than previous models.
A Real Example
One of my friends has an online store that uses a hosted service. During a sale, one of the servers went down. Normally that would mean lost revenue, and very upset customers. The host, however, relies on a model of load balancing and automatic failover, so another server took over immediately and everything continued. The customers were not even aware.
That is what strong planning looks like.
What To Look For In A Hosting Provider
When selecting a dedicated server hosting provider, make sure you ask if they have:- RAID storage (backup for hard-drives)
- Two sources of power
- Multiple connections to the internet
- Automatic failover for hardware and software
- 24/7 monitoring