Capital Hosting

If you are running an online business then maybe the majority if not all of your revenue depends on the availability of your website. Any extended down time can have a direct impact on your business's survival.

It is important to recognize that there are many risk factors that can bring a website down. Such risks include server hardware failure, network failure and sabotage.

Having your services go offline for extended period of time is extremely frustrating and painful and can damage your business's reputation and profitability.

However, with the proper redundancy in place you can significantly reduce the risks. Unlike offline physical businesses, which are protected by bricks and mortar, online businesses can be erased with just a few key strokes. It is the webmaster's responsibility to always be prepared for the worst.

Web Server Redundancy
Web servers are just computers whose hardware will degrade over time. Unless you run your own in-house servers, it will be very difficult for you to know the precise condition of your server hardware. The most important component inside the server is the hard disk, where all your data is stored. When the hard disk fails you would have lost all of your data. If you have a dedicated server then it is a good idea to have a secondary hard drive mirror the primary hard drive in a RAID1 configuration.

You also need to be aware of saboteurs who hack into servers to cause damage. It is good idea to have some form of firewall on your server and use highly secure login procedures and passwords.

In any case, you should regularly back up the most important files on your server and store the back up on an external machine. It could be another server on a different physical network or your own personal computer.

Network Redundancy
In addition to web server redundancy, you should also be prepared for when the physical network goes down. This could be caused by local power outages, natural disasters and malicious attacks on the physical network. In such cases your customers will be unable to reach your server so you should have a secondary server hosted in a different network (i.e. different geographic location).

The secondary server can be configured using RSYNC/Replication scripts to 'mirror' the primary server in real-time. This means the secondary server will always be an exact copy of the primary server. When the primary server goes down, the secondary server is capable of taking over the services without any data loss. GoDaddy's Premium DNS package provides an option to specify a secondary nameserver so in the event of primary nameserver being unreachable their DNS server will automatically re-route traffic to the secondary server.

Dawson Gao is a member of lacartes.com - an online community that helps people find local businesses, meet new friends and search for jobs.

He has written numerous articles about SEO and internet marketing and regularly advices small businesses on e-commerce and free online marketing techniques.