If you run an online business then you can appreciate the importance of server uptime. Any down time will have a direct impact on your revenue. If your website suffers from regular service interruptions, it will also negatively affect what your customers think of you. Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive industry, where millions of businesses from around the world compete together without borders. The smallest competitive advantage or disadvantage could make the difference between survival and failure. Once customers lose confidence in your business, they will stop dealing with you because finding an alternative is extremely easy. There are many ways in which a website can go down and you need to be prepared for as many scenarios as possible.

The first step is always to keep regular backups of your file and store your backups in an off-site location, in different mediums (pc hard drive, portable hard drive, DVDs etc). Then you want to make sure you have a backup server so if a hardware failure brings the primary server down, services can continue to run on the backup server without any significant interruptions. This is more advanced and the technical detail is beyond the scope of this article.

Once your servers are backed up you want to make sure web visitors can always find them. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the system that redirects every web visitor to the location of a domain's host server so the visitor can download the files necessary to view the website on his/her web browser. Without this system, web visitors will not be able to access any website because the web browser won't know where the websites are located. As the webmaster, it is your job to create a 'zone' file that contains all the information about the web server's locations and services. The 'zone' files are then stored in a DNS server, whose job is to inform anyone looking for your website where your servers are. Without it, even if your web servers are still running, people will not be able to reach your website.

The way to protect yourself against DNS failure is to use multiple primary servers and slave servers. Slave servers are servers that purely mirror the zone records of the master (primary) server. You can also set up additional primary servers, where you will need to set up the zone records from scratch. If you have multiple primary servers then you must make sure every update is implemented on all primary servers.

Once you have multiple servers, if one of them fails, the others will automatically take over and keep routing your web traffic to your web servers.

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