How Multiple Server Hosting impacts your website's uptime
Please consider the following article for your ezine, ebook or
web site. It is free to use as long as you include the resource
box at the end. It contains 792 words. If you use this article,
please send a brief message to let me know where it appeared.
info@irieisle-online.com
Article available for reprint: godfreyh@irieisle-online.com
==================================================== Hosting of
web sites has essentially become a commodity. There is very
little distinguishing one hosting company from the next. Core
plans and features are the same and price is no longer a true
determining feature. In fact, choosing a host based on the
cheapest price can be more expensive in the long term with
respect to reliability issues and possible loss of sales as a
result of website downtime.
Selecting a host from the thousands of providers and resellers
can be a very daunting task, which may result in a hit and miss
approach. But although hosting may have become a commodity, one
distinguishing feature that you must always look out for is
reliability.
At the heart of any hosting company's reliability is redundancy.
This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will
be an alternative which ensures continuity as seemlessly and
transparently as possible.
Most hosts do employ redundant network connections. These are
the high speed pipes that route data from the server to your web
browser. But, redundant 'multiple web servers' have been
extremely rare and very expensive, requiring costly routing
equipment which has previously been used only in mission
critical applications of Fortune 500 companies.
However, a very neat but little known Domain Name Server(DNS)
feature called 'round robin' allows the selection and provision
of a particular IP address from a 'pool' of addresses when a DNS
request arrives.
To understand what this has to do with server reliability it's
important to remember that the Domain Name Server (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, to get to your website.
Now, typically it takes at at least 2 to 3 days to propagate or