Can You Gaurantee Your Websites Uptime?

Whether you are purchasing a budget hosting plan, a reseller hosting plan, or a dedicated server, prepare for the worst and research your hosting provider.

Key factors to guarantee your website’s 100% uptime:

RAID

Whether you use RAID 1, RAID 5, or RAID 10, you should have some type of RAID on the server you are hosting on.  Hard drive failures are one of the leading causes for data loss and website downtime.   If you server is not running some type of RAID, it could take anywhere from 24 – 72 hours for your website to come back up or this could cause all your data to be lost.

Load Balance Servers and Application Servers

Load Balance Servers and Application Servers are great investments.  The purchase of a load balance server and application server is a great investment to insure that your web server gets its full life expectancy.  It balances the load between the web server and the load balancing server. As well as having all your applications on the application server in case your web server fails, you would not lose your applications.

This is more for the dedicated hosting customer than any other.  According to Hosted Today’s lead techs, unless you are hosting with a budget hosting company, most shared hosting environments have this type of environment.

Clustered or Mirrored Database Servers

Clustered or Mirrored Database servers are as important, or even more important, than a load balancing server or application server.  Servers go down, but seldom do you see 2 servers go down simultaneously.  Clustering or Mirroring a server can be the difference between minutes verses hours. When it comes to database information as well as your websites uptime, mirrored and clustering servers is the way to go.

Additional datacenters

To guarantee a website’s uptime of 100%, it is recommended that high volume companies implement another data center into their hosting plan.

This is commonly referred to as Cloud Hosting, which means using multiple data centers for redundancy and using multiple servers for different functions. This is a little more costly, but worth the investment.

It is not appropriate for small budget hosting companies or starting dedicated server customers because it is a little costly and your hosting company should provide one of the items mentioned here.

BACKUPS!!!!

One of the most common human errors in the technology world is accidental deletion of data.  It is imperative to backup!

SECURITY

Application Firewall – This will help in the protection of crucial applications for your website and assist in guaranteeing your website does go down due to a hack.

Intrusion Protection System (IPS) – This device will monitor your network and system activities for malicious or unwanted behavior and can react in real to block or prevent those activities. (Wikipedia – IPS January 2010)

Antivirus – This will help the assurance of website uptime by keeping an updated catalog of viruses that could affect your systems and cause unwanted downtime.

Updated Patches – Keep your applications and software up to date with the latest version to prevent any downtime due to an issue arising with the software or applications.

Redundant Physical Firewalls – This is important because the data center or host that you host with should have these implemented to prevent anyone from attacking your inner most layers (YOUR SERVER).