Managed Hosting Service Outages: Know Your Risks

Managed hosting service outages are a nightmare for businesses running their websites on servers. Any server outage, due to human error or natural disaster, can cause significant losses for the online reputation of a business, especially if the website does not load when the target audience tries to access it. This could mean loss of significant customers and business.

An outage even for a few minutes has the potential to cause a website to go offline for hours, making it inaccessible to your target audience, which may amount to big business losses in the short run. In the event of an outage when databases require more time to recover from the loss of power, prospects and customers may move away to a competitor site with much more urgency due to dissatisfaction and frustration emanating from their failure to open and access your site.

Managed Hosting: The Need for BackupAs a business with an online presence, you expect perfect availability of and connectivity to your data and don't want your prospects and customers to lose access to your website at any cost. When considering opting for hosting solutions, it is important to find out a web host that offers a backup option and redundant power and connectivity, which might come at an additional investment but are indispensable for the working of your website. Unplanned outages can prove to be extremely costly, thus highlighting the importance of planning for any eventuality, disaster recovery and taking preventative action.

• Hosting your mission-critical data on well-maintained infrastructure is critically important. You can expect to receive redundant power and IP connectivity from a managed host, especially in the event of a natural disaster. However, many managed hosting service providers often fall short of that. âEUR¢ Moving your mission-critical data and applications to a fully managed hosted environment available in a secure data center will ensure adequate protection against any form of outages, including power and Internet connectivity.

• Hosting your data with hosting solutions allows you to add extra built-in redundancy for failover protection in the event of common outages or extreme conditions. Some data centers are designed for redundancy to ensure availability of high density internet connections and power to critical server systems, thus assuring that the critical applications and data can be restored within a reasonable time frame if a disaster occurs in the primary data center so that the business continues to run.

• A number of managed servers are hosted in data centers equipped with an N+1 redundant Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning system, which allows a duplicate system to immediately come online in case of an HVAC system failure.

It is, therefore, important to know the risks that might fall on you with a particular hosting solution. While selecting a managed hosting service, make sure their data centers promise to offer redundant backup systems, thus giving you the confidence that you have entrusted your business to a stable, secure, and reliable managed hosting service provider.