Wednesday, October 1, 2008

How Does Multiple Server Hosting Affect Your Website's Uptime?

By Bob Willis

Hosting of websites has become an increasingly popular business and it has become difficult to tell between a quality and inferior company, just from the looks of it. The pricing structures, core features and plans are almost the same with most hosting companies. In fact, opting a cheap hosting company is not a cost-effective method, especially in terms of long-term results. Reliability is one aspect hat comes into play here or else it could cost your website loss of sales as a result of downtime. The process of selecting a quality web hosting company therefore is like sifting for a needle from a haystack. One prominent aspect that cannot be overlooked however is the reliability of the hosting provider. In the web hosting industry, this reliability equates to redundancy. This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will be an alternative, which ensures continuity as seamlessly and transparently as possible. In order to address issues, most of the hosting providers employ redundant network connections. These comprise of high-speed pipes that route data from the server to your web browser. However, these redundant multiple web servers come at a very hefty price and are usually utilized for mission critical applications of Fortune 500 companies.

The DNS or Domain Name Server feature also referred to as "round robin" allows the selection and provision of a particular IP address from multiple addresses when a DNS request arrives. In terms of server reliability, the DNS database maps a host name to their IP address. So instead of using a hard to remember series of numbers (IP address) we just type in your web browser www.yourdomain.com, in order to access your website.

It usually takes a few days to propagate the DNS information through the World Wide Web. So in case of domain registration or transfer, it takes a while before the user can access your website. This delay in the process could raise security issues if the website is hosted on multiple servers. So if something goes wrong with one server, this would imply that your website too would go down.

However, the round robin DNS strategy solves this issue by mapping your domain name to more than one IP address. A quality hosting company would always employ the DNS round robin technique as a conjunct to "failover monitoring".

The user should therefore look for a web host who employs an elegant solution to multi server hosting. This could constitute very expensive hardware based failover-monitoring systems that point a virtual IP address to other ISP's, while behind the scenes are handling a number of unique IP addresses on different servers.

With the advent and employment of latest technology, various issues can now be resolved with fair amount of ease. The user must however do his research well and select a company that offers maximum uptime. The technology to achieve this readily available and while it could cost the company a bit more, it would definitely reflect its reliability and credibility in the hosting industry.


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