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How Multiple Server Hosting impacts your web sites uptime

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How Multiple Server Hosting impacts your website's uptime by:

Godfrey E. Heron



This article describes the technology behind multiple server

hosting and how you may utilize it to maximize your site's

security and uptime.



Hosting of websites 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.



If you don't know the uptime of your site, or its performance

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At the heart of any hosting company's reliability is redundancy.

This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will

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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 least 2 to 3 days to propagate or

spread the word of your DNS info throughout the internet.

That's why when you register or transfer a domain name it isn't

immediately available to the person browsing the web.



This delay has stymied the security benefits of hosting your

site on multiple servers, as your website would be down for a

couple of days if something went awry with one server. You would

have to change your DNS to reflect your second server and wait

days before the change was picked up in routers on the internet.



Failover Monitoring



However, the round robin DNS strategy solves this predicament,

by mapping your domain name to more than one IP address. Select

hosting companies now employ the DNS round robin technique in

conjunction with 'failover monitoring'.



The DNS round robin failover monitoring process starts by a web

hosting company setting up your site on two or more independent

web servers (preferably with different IP blocks assigned to

them). Your domain name will therefore have 2 or more IP

Addresses assigned to it.



Then the failover monitor watches your web server(s) by

dispatching data to a URL you specify and looking for particular

text in the results. When the system detects that one of your IP

addresses is returning an error, and the others aren't, it pulls

that IP address out of the list. The DNS then points your domain

name to the working IP address/s



If any of your IP's come back online they are restored to the IP

pool. This effectively and safely keeps your site online even

if one of your web servers is down.



The average failure detection and recovery time with a system

like this can be as low as 15 minutes. This time varies

depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the

failure and also how long other ISP's cache (save) your DNS

information.



The time taken for other ISP's caching your information can be

manipulated in the failover monitor by lowering the "time to

live" (TTL) cache settings. These are the settings that other

ISP's will use to determine how long to cache your DNS

information.



Of course you must bear in mind the matter of how frequently

data is synchronized between your website's servers. This will

be the hosting company's responsibility, and this may become

complicated where databases and user sessions are involved.



The very expensive hardware based failover monitoring systems

that point a virtual IP address to other ISP's, while behind the

scenes juggling a number of unique IP addresses on different

servers, is of course the most 'elegant' solution to multi

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That way, the whole issue of ISP's caching your information does

not come into play.



Therefore, for websites that need to have true 99.99995% uptime,

without huge outlays of money, the technology is readily

available and certain proprietary failure monitoring systems are

now relatively cheap to apply.



About the author:

Godfrey Heron is the Website Manager of Irieisle Multiple Domain

Hosting Services. Sign up for your free trial, and host

multiple web sites on one account.