Redundancy is generally viewed as superfluous repetition or overlapping, excessive, and unnecessary. In web hosting it has a totally different meaning, where in layman’s terms, it means backup.
So when it comes to databases, networking, website maintenance, and other technical endeavours, redundancy is not optional or even necessary — it is essential!
All organisations, sooner or later will face minor disasters, for example, hardware failure, power outage, internet disruptions, and so on. Shockingly, many will likewise experience genuine disasters, for example, flooding, fire, earthquake, terrorist attack, and so-on. What distinguishes the organisations that bounce back from such challenges without a negative impact from those that can’t deal with the outage and go out of business?
Redundancy……
In 2019, some of the largest (in terms of customers) UK Web Hosts (and their resellers) such as GoDaddy UK (HeartInternet is now part of GoDaddy) experienced periods of extended downtime, some of more than 32 hours. How would you feel if a major service provider for your business suddenly went “off-grid”, no website was online, and your emails were bouncing back? Wouldn’t you worry about the security of the company? Wouldn’t it reduce your confidence in that organisation? If that’s how you feel, imagine how your customers would feel about your company! The goal in today’s digital business connectivity is to achieve uptime, which means systems are up and fully functional 99.999 percent of the time. The .001 percent of the time systems aren’t up should be for regularly scheduled maintenance, or should be extremely rare instances. Redundancies are the only way to achieve this. Redundancy leads to less downtime, so don’t settle for anything less than 99% uptime.
InstaHost has multiple levels of redundancies in building power, internet connectivity, and server storage redundancy to ensure that your data is secure and to guarantee 99.9% uptime
There are different forms of redundancy: Network, Hardware, Power, and Geographic.
Network Redundancy:
This backup is basically for the network a web hosting company uses to get you on the web. Reliable providers have multiple backup systems set up to switch networks to guarantee that your website never goes down. When selecting web hosting services, make certain your vendor has redundancies set up. InstaHost is uniquely positioned, partnering with the Global Leaders in Digital Delivery. This enables us to provide UK and Global communications at unmatched speeds. The recent outages within the UK has been due to a lack of rendundacy in network infrastructures, which is why InstaHost has not experienced these issues.
Hardware Redundancy:
This backup is for the physical pieces of server hardware. All critical hardware needs redundancies, including hard drives and RAM stacks. These should always be hot swappable. For instance, one layer of redundancy is for the hard drives. At InstaHost, we run on a reliable and high-performance custom built Dell Webservers with Dual octa-core processors. Each Dell web server has two 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5 v4 (Broadwell) octa-core processors with hyper-threading. This gives 40 logical cores per machine. These have access to plenty of fast memory resource: 64 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM. Any of our web servers can serve any website we host at any time. Every single hard drive in use is a Samsung Solid State Drive for reliability and speed. InstaHost delivers excellence through our proprietary autoscaling technology, created by our team of experts. No other company has access to this.
Autoscaling literally means that our resources scale automatically. Bandwidth, memory and processing power is scaled up or down instantly – depending on demand. This is what makes them ‘true cloud’. If there’s a surge in traffic, your website will continue to offer the same fast experience for every user.
This is because a site isn’t hosted on one or two servers. Instead, it can access the whole platform’s resources: multiple servers. And we always keep dedicated resources in reserve to cope with traffic.
Power Redundancy:
These are the backups for the power that keeps your servers and data center running. A few organizations share power supplies with administrations from various service organisations. Our UK data centre is ISO27001:2013 certified. It has modern security features including:
- Photo ID and swipe card entry
- 24-7 security on site
- CCTV inside and out
- Gated access and secure perimeter fencing
- Redundant and uninterruptible power supplies. Delivering power exclusively for our systems for short interruptions or longer term power supply issues
Geographic Redundancy:
Offsite redundancy data centres that are well out of range of localised incidents or disasters are employed by InstaHost with Datacentre geographically dispersed with each DataCentre having capacity to deliver all services.
InstaHost understands that moving from an unreliable webhost is a big decision – especially for Smaller businesses, or organisations without a digital or IT department, which is why we deliver a comprehensive website migration service for free! We can migrate your website during out of hours, to our secure platforms within hours (including emails) with less than one hour of downtime (this is whilst nameservers are being repointed – usually less than 10 minutes) We migrate more than 20 websites a week and have a current retention rate of 100%, our services are designed to deliver excellent ROI and VFM, so we do not tie you into onerous contracts – our clients stay with us due to the quality of our services!
Why not come and have a chat with us today? – No obligations, no hassle, no hard sell. Explore how easy it is to receive the service level you deserve!
