Fail Over, 7 servers, 7 minutes away.

Our fail over system provides you with added reliability and the peace of mind that your site will not be off line for more than 7 minutes. Unlike other simpler hosting methods where your site is served by one server with our fail over your site is served by 7 servers.

• 3 Geographically dispersed DNS servers

• Main Webserver

• Failover Web Server located in a separate continent

• Monitoring server

• Failover monitoring server.

The Myth of 99.99% availability.

Read the fine print, providers that claim to offer you 99.99% availability for your web site nearly never do, in their fine print they state that period of scheduled maintenance are not included in this calculation. Thus a half hour time that is used to update the server software is in reality down time during which your customers and potential customers will not be able to reach your site. A web site that is not online is a has a direct and strong negative impact on your business.

Best things in life come in pairs.

Lets begin with the Main Web Server, it is located in a state of the art data center with over 13 redundant connections to the Internet, redundant power, UPS and diesel generators. But even with such a high end setup that only the best providers have, failure is still inevitable. This is why a second server that is located in a different continent serves as a backup for the main one. Backups to this server are performed on a regular basis with a frequency that depends on your package. This backup server is thus ready to take the lead when the main server or its connectivity has failed or is in maintenance.

Monitor and react.

Our monitoring server will check your site every 4 minutes to check if it is responding with an agreed upon response. If it is not, then it will tell the DNS to point all new visitors to the backup site. This usually takes 3 minutes, and ensures that as many new visitors will be able to see your backup site as soon as possible. In case the main monitoring server fails then the backup monitoring server takes its place. The backup monitoring server is in a different data center. Both monitoring servers are geographically distant from the web servers to ensure that they can monitor both the true availability of the physical server and its connectivity.

DNS.

Maybe we should have started with telling you that it is the DNS servers that point visitors to your website when you enter your domain in the browser, but mainy of you will already know this. We have 3 DNS in 3 different locations all of them controlled by either the monitoring server or its backup. When your site fails it is the DNS servers that tell new visitors to visit the backup web server instead of the main one.

One Site, 5 different data centers.

As you see even a single catastrophic earthquake should not affect the availability of your web site, since it is served and monitored by a total of 5 different data centers in different locations around the world.

Is this good for me?

We hope it is, but in reality this setup is not for every one. You can check this page to see the situations in which this system is suitable and judge for your self. You can also contact us and tell us more about your site and its specific requirements and we will give you free and realistic advice about the suitability of our service to your specific needs.

Limitations.

What we can guarantee is that after a maximum of 7 minutes, our DNS will point to your backup server. This will in affect all new visitors to your site except with some ISPs use non standards compliant DNS servers. These servers try to save bandwidth by not requesting a new address for your website in a normal way. Such ISPs are not the norm, and the chances of a site visitors having one of these is less than 1%.