Untraceable data, an inaccessible application. In business, when a computer server encounters a failure or malfunction, it can quickly be panic! The solution? Use high availability hosting, which limits risks and avoids interruptions.
What is high availability?
The term “high availability” designates all the processes, systems and infrastructures which ensure a high level of access to a server. With high availability hosting, you can access your data 24 hours a day, even in the event of a breakdown hardware or network, power outages, computer bug or software malfunction.
The question of availability is today a major issue for companies; for example, it is critical in the industrial sector, where the slightest breakdown can cause a production chain to stop.
Measure server availability
The availability of a service is generally in percentages and is defined with the hosting provider. With an availability rate of 99%, the interruption time is a maximum of 3.65 days per year or 7.10 hours per month. It sounds fine, but for many companies, it’s not enough! Better to aim for a higher availability rate: with a rate of 99.9% or 99.99%, you divide your downtime by 10 and 100 respectively.
How to guarantee high availability hosting?
High availability is based on the principle of hardware redundancy: we do not store data on a single server, but on several. There is, therefore, no single point of failure. The data is synchronized and if one server encounters a problem, another automatically takes over so that there is no or very little interruption. We also recommend that you use a backup solution for your data.
Very high availability: the ultimate in hosting
The principle of very high availability hosting is to guarantee total and continuous availability to websites or online services.
Unlike shared hosting, a cloud server or even a dedicated server, very high availability hosting guarantees redundancy and total reliability for your services in any condition. If the unthinkable should happen (failure of a server or an entire datacenter), your online services will continue to operate normally and without interruption, and this commitment is contractually guaranteed according to your requirements.
The terms of very high availability hosting are defined in an SLA contract, which offers important guarantees to the customer in the event of non-compliance with the commitments set by the host. Each situation involving specific needs depending on the customer’s environment, these contracts are generally defined to measure, and the customer benefits from personalized support in setting up and maintaining its infrastructure.
Operation of a very high availability infrastructure
In order to guarantee the reliability and total availability of online services, the infrastructure for very high availability hosting is based on several Web servers and databases distributed in different datacenters.
As illustrated in this diagram, requests from visitors to a site hosted with this technology are managed by a couple of load balancers whose role is to contact the available servers, which constantly optimizes resource management and the performance of the entire infrastructure. The strength of such hosting is that the data is always replicated in at least two data centres, which guarantees their availability no matter what.
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