Best Practices for getting High Availability Web Hosting | 99.99% uptime
As organisations become more and more dependent on their online presence, they are dependent on the service level provided to their clients. That will include the availability of their web presence. Losing service could be disastrous for an organisation.
Managed Service Providers (“MSPs”) offering web hosting services need to make sure that they can demonstrate high availability of web hosting to give their clients comfort. It’s all very well to say 999.9999% availability’, but they also need to show that they can recover from an outage quickly and efficiently with the minimum of disruption to their clients.
High Availability and Business Continuity is the name of the game.
High Availability – The Definition
High Availability Web Hosting can be defined as the infrastructure, operational procedures and optimisations that are designed to ensure a specified level of accessibility for users to the hosting servers. The specified level is usually defined in a Service Level Agreement between the MSP and the client, set out as a percentage of total availability.
The best way to get High Availability Web Hosting – Requirements
High Availability Web Hosting needs an infrastructure with reliable power and network connectivity to allow the functional server or servers to operate.
Be aware that it is sometimes difficult to compare “high availability” claims. Take care to understand what availability measures mean in practice. As an example, 99.9% availability could mean an average of 10 minutes of downtime per week. 99.99% means 1 minute per week.
High Availability –The Environment
One simple definition of a High Availability Web Hosting environment is one with no single point of failure. Each infrastructure component is duplicated so that if it fails, there is a backup component to take over. It also means that for a total loss of service, there must be multiple failures in the infrastructure.
Resilient infrastructures include redundant power supplies and redundant network connections. Most MSPs operate datacentres with a Tier III certification, which by definition includes a high availability configuration. The objective of the MSP is to ensure that their clients are happy that power and network connectivity are provided with a very low chance of interruption.
As an example, the HostSailor High Availability Web Hosting infrastructure in Romania has been very carefully designed with availability as a key factor. The data centres are designed and equipped with the latest technology that will self-heal a network in the event of a network failure for whatever reason.
Which features should consider used for getting high availability?
To ensure nothing slips through the cracks, the highly secure and safe data centres are routinely monitored 24/7. Local and remote support technicians are always available, which means any incidents are dealt with quickly and with minimal delay.
The Romanian private data centres are powered by a dark fibre ring throughout Bucharest. This ring has currently seven points of presence, from where the data centres are securely connected to our Hostsailor servers, ensuring access unless all seven PoPs fail at the same time.
