It’s been a great winter for us here at Fresh Roasted Hosting. We love snow. Seriously — give us a French press, gas burner, some fresh water, and beans from our favorite local roaster, and we’re set. Servers … they’re a different story. They don’t really care for beans (we’ve tried), they aren’t interested in the French press vs pourover debate, and they definitely aren’t big on water. Oh well.
Unfortunately, as much as we love snow, utility power failures do happen. No matter how many redundant connections you have, things can and do go wrong with the grid. That’s why your web host absolutely positively needs to be prepared with backup power on-site. It’s not enough to truck in a large generator when disaster strikes; that can result in hours of downtime while the truck navigates the snowy roads to the facility. A genset has to be on-site, ready to fire up on a moment’s notice when the power goes out.
So what can you do about it? For starters, make sure your host is using a tier II or better (the higher the better) datacenter. This ensures you have a high level of redundancy for when things don’t go right. You’ll also want to make sure your host uses a blend of bandwidth including at least three tier 1 carriers (with bandwidth providers, a lower tier is better). That way, if one or two carriers have trouble, you’ve still got a solid connection to the Internet.
But there’s more to a reliable datacenter than just refrigerator-sized UPSes and massive diesel generators. If your network goes down, all the power protection in the world isn’t worth a cup of truck stop coffee. That’s why we use a blend of bandwidth from multiple tier 1 carriers including Verizon, Level(3), and Zayo. We blend them in with multiple tier 2 carriers including Comcast and Frontier Communications. This means that with rare exceptions, if one carrier has trouble, your traffic automatically gets routed around the issue and uses the best available route to your customers. And because we use only enterprise-class networking equipment from Cisco and HP, you get fast, reliable transit inside the datacenter as well.
Of course, no web host can absolutely assure you that your site will never go down. No matter how robust a host’s infrastructure, things can always malfunction. This is why if a host ever tells you that you’ll never experience any downtime, you’re getting fed a line of marketing fluff and need to run, not walk, in the opposite direction. Still, some hosts still “guarantee” 100% uptime — and when you read the fine print, this only means that they’ll refund some of your money when your site goes down. Because that’s a lot less expensive than building a robust infrastructure in the first place.
So enjoy the snow, Central PA! Whether we get an inch of slop or three feet of the fluffy stuff, know that if you’re hosted with us, you’re already well-prepared to weather just about any storm.
Unless you’re low on coffee.
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