After reading a blog post on www.thewhir.com "How to guarantee your website never goes down"(Stacey Griggs, VP of Sales, Maximum ASP, and Feb, 09, 2010)I began to think about how do you really guarantee your website does not go down?

The blog speaks about data center uptimes of 4 or 5 - 9's (99.99 - 99.999%) and the SLA's (Service Level Agreement) that data centers provide which pays their customers penalties for downtime. This brought me to think:

How much does your website being down mean to you?

If our website goes down how much does it affect our business? The answer is it is not so much for how it affects www.hostchart.com but how it affects our customers.  Hostchart is an online hosting directory where we focus on assuring our customers that they are being found on the internet by getting our directory ranking in the search engines for those keywords that are important to them.  So if we go down it is like our customers go down as well.  They lose the visibility and we lose a possible customer. That is why when you read below we implement 5 out of the 6 features that are important to assure our website does not go down.

How do you guarantee your website uptime?

>The blog mentions a few great points that I would like everyone to know about when purchasing a web hosting plan.  Whether you are purchasing a budget hosting plan,  a reseller hosting plan, or a dedicated server  you should always prepare for the worst and do your research on your hosting provider.

Below are some key factors when guaranteeing your website's 100% uptime:

What RAID is your server currently running?

Whether you use RAID 1, RAID 5, or RAID 10 you should have some type of RAID on the server you are hosting with.  Hard drive failures are common in the hosting industry; I like to call this the "COMMON FAILURE”.  Hard drive failures are one of the leading causes for data loss and website downtime.  When a hard drive fails it can be disastrous for a company.  In some cases if you server is not running some type of RAID it could take anywhere from 24 - 72 hours for your website to come back up or this could cause all your data to be lost.

This is quite disturbing for company like the one mentioned in the article that makes $3,000 per hour which equates to $26 million dollars per year.  If a company like this was on a server that was not running some type of RAID. They would run the risk of losing $72,000 per day for everyday that their website was not up.  I do not like to think of these odds and neither should you.

In my opinion some type of RAID is needed to insure your website is up and running 100% of the time. In most case you should consider RAID #1 on your list.

Are Load Balance Servers and Application Servers a good investment?

I would have to agree with the writer on this one; yes Load Balance Servers and Application Servers are great investments.  The reason I agree with the writer is that any one server can't run indefinitely.  Therefore it is a great investment to purchase a load balance server and application server to make sure that your web server gets it full life expectancy by balancing your load between the web server and the load balancing server. As well as having all your applications on the application server in case your web server fails; you would not lose your applications.

I would say that this is more for the dedicated hosting customer than any other.  Most shared hosting environments unless you are hosting with a budget hosting company has this type of environment according to Hosted Today's lead techs.

How important are Clustered or Mirrored Database Servers?

Clustered or Mirrored Database servers are as important of even more important than a load balancing server or application server.  Servers go down, but seldom do you see 2 servers go down at once.  Clustering or Mirroring a server can be the matter of minutes verses hours. When it comes to your database information as well as your websites uptime mirrored and clustering your servers is the way to go.

Should you implement another datacenter into your plan?

If you are like the company in the article who makes $26 million dollars a year and you want to guarantee your website's uptime of 100%.  I would definitely implement another data center into your hosting plan.

This is commonly referred to as Cloud Hosting.  Cloud hosting in its simplest form is when you use multiple data centers for redundancy and use multiple servers for different functions. This is a little more costly but for a company like the one mentioned in the article it is worth the investment.
I would not suggest this for small budget hosting companies or starting dedicated server customers as it is a little costly and your hosting company should provide one of the items mentioned here.

BACKUPS!!!!

After all the features we have mentioned this far back up is right at the top of the list of items needed.  One of the most common human errors in the technology world is accidental deletion of data.  I can't count how many times I would be working on an article or moving a hosting account from one server to another and I deleted a file by accident.

If you did not take a back up like the old saying goes "You are up the creek without a paddle."

Last but not least SECURITY:

How much security can one get?  If you ask a Fort Knox guard how much security is good security he would probably say there is never enough security and there is always a way through.

The article mentions a few steps in the right direction when it comes to security for your hosting environment to assure your website is up and running 100% of the time:

• Application Firewall - This will help  in the protection of crucial applications for your website and assist in the guarantee your website does go down due to a hack
• Intrusion Protection System (IPS) - This device will monitor your network and system activities for malicious or unwanted behavior and can react in real to block or prevent those activities. (Wikipedia - IPS January 2010)
• Antivirus - This will help the assurance of website uptime by keeping an updated catalog of virus that could affect your systems and cause unwanted downtime
• Updated Patches - Keep your applications and software up to date with the latest version to prevent any downtime to an issue arising with the software or applications
• Redundant Physical Firewalls - This is important because the data center or host that you host with should have these implemented to prevent anyone from attacking your inner most layers (YOUR SERVER).