Have you ever witnessed a website fail at the worst possible time? That moment can be incredibly frustrating! This is the reason we take HA (high availability) and redundancy very seriously in our industry because they keep your websites and servers online during hardware failure. I want to discuss with you what they are in meaning in the most general and simple terms.
High availability essentially means that during almost any catastrophe your site or app will be available most of the time, despite a failure somewhere in the system.
In order to achieve HA, hosting companies have different tools such as:
• Load balancers – These share the traffic load between different servers, so that each server isn’t overloaded, and the site is available
• Failover systems – Automatically redirect traffic to another server that is working in the event of server failure.
• Multiple data centers – Servers in different geographical locations, with one lb or cloud failure, another server can take over.
Why do you think sites like Amazon or YouTube go down so infrequently? Because they have HA!
Redundancy simply means having backups for everything important in the hosting world, which includes:
Through the combination of HA and redundancy, you can safeguard your site from ever going down, no matter what happens.
What Is High Availability (HA)?
Let’s imagine that in your online shop the server fails during a big sale. Without HA, your site goes down and you lose money. With HA, the system is designed to switch to another server that is working to no inconvenience to the potential customer as soon as you have server failure.High availability essentially means that during almost any catastrophe your site or app will be available most of the time, despite a failure somewhere in the system.
In order to achieve HA, hosting companies have different tools such as:
• Load balancers – These share the traffic load between different servers, so that each server isn’t overloaded, and the site is available
• Failover systems – Automatically redirect traffic to another server that is working in the event of server failure.
• Multiple data centers – Servers in different geographical locations, with one lb or cloud failure, another server can take over.
Why do you think sites like Amazon or YouTube go down so infrequently? Because they have HA!
What Is Redundancy?
Let’s discuss redundancy. You can compare it to a spare tire in your car; You want to hope you never have to use it but it will save you if a tire goes flat.Redundancy simply means having backups for everything important in the hosting world, which includes:
- Additional servers that can replace any broken servers.
- Backup power systems for your website in the case of a power loss.
- Multiple internet connections to keep your site online in case one goes down.
How HA And Redundancy Work Together
Here’s the scoop: HA and redundancy work together.- Redundancy offers you back up systems
- High availability enables to only use those backups system once one goes down, and traffic will run without a pause.
Why Is This Important
You never want to go down, moving forward, especially if its a business website, or online store, even if its just a blog. The one thing we all know is visitors do not spend time on site that show downtime. You can lose not only customers, but even more important, trust.Through the combination of HA and redundancy, you can safeguard your site from ever going down, no matter what happens.
