High Availability Hosting 101
Downtime affects businesses in different ways. For some businesses, revenue loss is roughly proportional to the downtime of their website. This is the case when traffic levels and visitor values are relatively constant over time. A small amount of downtime will have a proportionately small revenue impact.
For those business websites with uneven traffic and visitor values, there may be critical times of the day, week, month, or year when most of their revenue is generated. An example of this are companies that make a high percentage of their revenue during specific events when traffic levels spike on the day of the event and visitors come for the purpose of making a purchase. An hour of downtime or intermittent downtimes occurring during this crucial day will have a major impact on revenue generation.
Another example might be a company that provides a monitoring service (such as monitoring website uptime) where the credibility of their service requires a near perfect uptime percentage.
Companies where even a few tenths of one percent downtime is too much of a gamble, would benefit from High Availability Hosting. High availability hosting uses redundancy to ensure there are no single points of failure. This means that if one particular part of the system fails, there is another identical component to take its place. The switch over process to the backup component must also reliably occur. In such a set up, downtime would require the failure of multiple components at the same time which is statistically improbable. Such redundancy applies to server access in the form of auxiliary network connections. Redundant servers are also used by means of a cloud server arrangement.
In addition to protection against component failure, high availability hosting must protect its servers from capacity overload. This is accomplished by distributing workload among multiple servers which prevents a website from going down when it sees large traffic spikes. Through the combination of redundancy, reliable switch over (called failover), and reliable fault detection, uptime rates as high as 100% can be achieved.
If you require high availability hosting, contact us to learn how our clustered cloud servers can maximize your website’s uptime.
