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