How do Hosting Company acheive 99.9% uptime

[webtech]

Hi,

I am Just wondering, Can hosing companies succed with 99.9% uptime gurantee????

Any opinion would be appreciated.

Thanks

[JKS]

I don;t think they can Manage their servers with 99.9 % uptime.Thats pure lieing.The maximum percentage of uptime they can offer is 99.2 to 99.5

[northwind]

JKS Posted on Feb 5 2003, 10:06 AM
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I don;t think they can Manage their servers with 99.9 % uptime.Thats pure lieing.The maximum percentage of uptime they can offer is 99.2 to 99.5

This is not true. It is very possible for a host to offer 99.9% uptime. You gotta put it into perspective. That .1% is actually 36.5 hours during the whole year. That is almost 2 days of downtime that the server could experience. Most advanced hosting companies have multiple connection lines running through onto their servers. So if one goes down, there is always a backbone. Recently everyone has been experiencing downtimes due to the DoS virus which infected the 12 major backbones we call the internet.

Also, almost all datacenters offer daily backup of data, and a Generator service if the power does go out. Also, you will hardly find a sucessful hosting company with just 1 server. You can have a back-up server or share the resources so when one is overwhelmed the other one pops in. Also RAID is included on most servers which insures stability. Plus, if the hosting company did their homework before starting the business, they will see which server runs best under what conditions, how stable they are, and how long they will last before a reboot is needed.

Also, 100% Uptime is pure lying. They may claim 100% network uptime, but this 100% NETWORK uptime does not include anything except ping and power which consists of about 50% of a server's uptime. The rest has to do with server hardware, software and common sense administration.

[dweiss]

Originally posted by webtech@Jan 25 2003, 06:54 PM
I am Just wondering, Can hosting companies succed with 99.9% uptime gurantee????

Any opinion would be appreciated.

Sure they can succeed, the issue is how does one get 99.9 percent (or thereabout) uptime. The answer here can involve a lot of "it depends ... " but here are a few thougths. First, lets separate network uptime from server uptime. Granted, both are required to get a web page to a user, but they involve different approaches from the providers perspective. For discussion purposes, I'm going to suggest that network uptime is now easier to obtain than server uptime, though some will disagree, and thus I'll focus on server uptime.

First, OS choices make a big difference. I suppose a lot of hosting firms use various Unix OS variations because they are cheap - or free - but they are also generally easier to maintain for uptime objectives. Most of all, compared to Windows, Unix (Linux, Free BSD, Net BSD, etc) all require less rebooting as a standard part of their mainteance and operation. I'll get flack on this, but I'd also suggest Novell Netware as an excellent candidate for an OS that can run forever without rebooting. Not many ISPs or hosting firms run Netware, but it can be used and you can even run Apache on it.

Beyond the OS, you need to consider server hardware. A real server class machine is essential if one is going to shoot for 99.99 percent uptime - that is, a system with dual power supplies, a RAID disk system, hot-swap disks, etc. is a critical element in uptime. Interestingly, an awful lot of hosts are now using servers without RAID, even with IDE disks. Such machines introduce additional failure risks, but one can still shoot for high uptime if those risks are managed correctly.

For the highest uptime, the ideal configuration would also utilize a multi-server clustering arrangement of some sort. This could be a multi-server fail-over cluster, or perhaps a less rigorous server data replication procedure with a round-robin type of failover DNS management. With one of these, or other, server backup arrangements, one has a better chance of hitting the uptime target with non-server class hardware, but my preference would be the server class machine with the clustering / fail-over systems.

Of course, all of the above is just the beginning - it is the first part of an overall uptime strategy. Real success depends on implementation, how one manages the overall strategcy. Even nearly bullet-proof hardware will not give you 99.9 percent uptime if your host doesn't have adequate staffing to maintain the equipment, take action when something goes wrong, etc.

Anyway, the bottom line is 99.9 percent, or better, uptime CAN be achieved. However, as I look for hosting firms I find very few, if any, that are really pursuing a strategy that will achieve that sort of uptime. More and more hosts seem to be running low end machines as servers, I see hardly any running any sort of fail-over clusters, and I'm preplexed at the increasing percentage of firms that don't even do daily backups of their systems.

-Danny.

[northwind]

Nicely said however, being a host myself, doing what you are suggesting isn't cheap for a new hosting busines starting out, especially the multi-server clustering.

RAID and the rest you mentioned are do-able and hopefully many are =), but something as far as load-balancing can be very costly to a host to set-up. Hopefully the company will realize that once it gets a bit of revenue that they will set-up such options but for a starting host, load-balancing a server is pretty difficult. Also, if indeed the network goes down, load-balancing wouldn't do much since its on the same network. =)