Do not let your website going down affect your business.
Websites today have to be available 24/7. Service interruptions can hit your revenue, produce a poor experience for your customers, lose sales opportunities and damage your company's image.
High availability is a concept referring to a system, or a website, that has minimal downtime and no single point of failure. It differs from fault tolerance, which relies on specialised hardware to detect hardware failures and switch to a redundant component.
Maintaining a highly available system requires monitoring tools that let you check the state of the system as a whole. In the event of an incident they trigger actions, usually a message about the current event, or running a script to automate the failover.
While high availability sounds like a great idea, implementing it is expensive — especially if you want to duplicate most of your hardware, which brings maintenance and training costs with it. Fortunately there are other ways to have a highly available environment for your data and your website: the cloud.
Cloud hosting
It provides a whole infrastructure of servers and devices in a remote location maintained by the cloud provider. That helps eliminate the up-front cost, the maintenance cost and the time it takes to set the environment up. It lets companies focus on building their web applications and deploying them quickly on available servers. Providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon can supply cloud hosting services that are reliable, scalable and economical.
Designing high-availability hosting has to take careful planning into account across three concepts: redundancy, failover and monitoring. Whether you build your own infrastructure or use cloud hosting, the benefits of a website with minimal downtime can offset the cost through a better experience for your customers or visitors, increasing your chances of winning new business.
