I recently spoke with a client who is selling about $3000 per hour on his site which equates to about $26 million per year. When configuring his hosting solution this client elected not to implement many of the tools that we offer to ensure 100% uptime. Ultimately this sounded like good material for a blog post. I specifically wrote this post for educate hosting consumers on the high availability options available from their providers. Most of this will be a basic review for the average hosting industry operator.
As a precursor, most quality hosting providers have significant redundancy built into their facilities and networks. This guaranteed redundancy typically is expressed as either 4 or 5 – 9’s (99.99 – 99.999%) of facility redundancy. A facility with 4 – 9’s is engineered to have no more than 53 minutes of downtime in a year, a facility with 5 – 9’s is engineered to have no more than 5 minutes of facility downtime per year. Typically providers will refer to these facilities as either Tier 3 or Tier 4 datacenters. Hosting providers reassure clients with Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) that pay their customers penalties for downtime, but these payments can be insignificant when compared to the sales lost by an outage. Often clients focus on the facility and network redundancies provided by their hosting company and pay less attention to the redundancy of their individual solution. Unfortunately, more downtime is caused by server and security issues than facility and network issues.
If your website requires 100% uptime you should implement the following technologies:
- RAID – It doesn’t matter (to me) if you implement RAID1, RAID5 or any other variant – hard drive failure is one of the most likely events to impact a client. It almost seems comical to include this, but in the past I spoken with people who can’t tolerate downtime but say they can’t afford RAID.
- Load Balanced Web and Application Servers – No single server can run indefinitely without failing. Load balanced servers are some of the best investments you can make in eliminating downtime.
- Clustered or Mirrored Database Servers – Again servers have limited life, they get old… they fail. The chance of two failing simultaneously is much less likely.
- Hot Secondary Site – No single datacenter can run forever, this option will double your cost but prevent the 5 – 53 minutes of possible annual downtime from the failure of a single Tier 3/4 facility described above.
- Backups – Classically backups are to prevent data loss, with the redundancy described above you may not think you need them. But the most common form of data loss is accidental deletion of data. If the only data you have is live data, this can cause issues.
- Appropriate Security – This includes an application firewall, Intrusion Protection System (IPS), antivirus, updated patches and redundant physical firewalls. Security issues and hackers can cause significant downtime unless reasonable precautions are taken.
While the configurations describe above aren’t for everyone, if you require 100% uptime you need something similar. Otherwise you are making the financial decision that some downtime is acceptable and likely. How likely is based on what combination of the above strategies you implement. Finally if you are hosted in the cloud, most cloud implantations natively utilize some of this redundancy (like RAID) but these best practices should be equally applied to cloud installations to ensure high availability. For more on the cloud see my previous post – How can the cloud be down? http://www.thewhir.com/blog/Stacy_Griggs/123009_How_can_the_cloud_be_down
About Stacy Griggs
Stacy Griggs is Sr. Director of Customer Experience for Cbeyond Cloud Services , previously Stacy was the Vice President of Sales for MaximumASP which was acquired by Cbeyond in 2011. Cbeyond (NASD-CBEY) is a publicly traded provider of telecommunication and cloud services, which has been recognized by Microsoft at its 2009 Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year and 2010 Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year. Prior to Cbeyond Stacy held a series of positions at Hosting.com including Chief Sales Officer, Chief Service Officer and General Manager for their flagship Delaware data center.
Stacy has led several information technology services companies over the last 15 years. He was a Managing Director for KForce a $1 Billion publicly traded professional services firm. At KForce Stacy managed 5 business units that collectively generated $18 Million in revenue and had 140 employees. Prior to KForce Stacy was a Vice President and part-owner of Diamond Technologies, an 80 employee custom software development firm. Previously Stacy held management positions at TMP Worldwide, the University of Pennsylvania, and Humana.
Through his theWHIR blog, Stacy will touch upon sales and service in the Web hosting space, web hosting events, cloud computing and industry trends.
No related posts.
