How to avoid Downtime for your Website?

Imagine that your website gives three days to its users to avail special discount for one of the services of your company, and the server where the site is hosted loses connection dues to a technical error. Such situations can wreck your business.

Even a best quality dedicated server hosted by a good service provider may encounter a technical problem. If you can’t afford your site to be unavailable even for a few hours, you should seek an alternative.

A few good web hosting service providers offer an alternative solution – where you can ensure that your site is never down, not even for a few hours. An excellent DNS feature – Round Robin takes care of this issue where a particular IP address is fetched from a pool of IP addresses. This feature uses a technology where your domain name is mapped to more than one IP address on different servers.

The site is hosted at multiple servers and a Failover Monitor keeps a track on your web servers by sending data to a URL. When one of your IP addresses returns an error, the system pulls that IP address out of the list and the DNS adjusts your domain name to another working IP address.

As soon as the faulty IP address comes back online, the system restores it back to IP pool. This ensures that your site is always online, even if there is some problem in one of your web servers.

This system results in the downtime time of as low as fifteen minutes. This is the time taken in caching the IP information from different servers. A couple of factors that determine this caching time are – the connection speed of your site and the reason behind the failure. To ensure best results, your service provider can set the caching time for DNS information.

There is another option where even the time required to fetch the IP address from cache is also not consumed. A failure monitor that is based on an expensive hardware system can point a virtual IP address to other IP address on different servers. This technology ensures almost 99.99995% uptime, and is available only with reputed hosting service providers.