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November 10th, 2006 [by Brian]
Keeping your web site alive 24/7/365 requires a lot more than a server and an internet connection. Many people are renting severs based on price and performance specs but there is so much more to it.
Sitting on the inside of an infrastructure provider (A company that owns physical data centers and manages network) you get a pretty unique understanding of what it takes to keep servers running and the web sites popping up with a quick snap that everyone likes to see. In this post I want to cover off what is involved, and points to consider, when you are choosing a partner to bet your business on.
- Risk of Natural Disaster – This is easily overlooked but a serious consideration. Data centers located in high risk zones such as those subject to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or earthquakes will not be able to do anything for you when the “Big One” hits. Choosing to locate in one of these areas without a redundant low risk backup location is very risky. If you only have the budget for one server in one location than choose a low risk area of the world.
- Power Availability & Reliability – Data centers are challenged more and more by power availability and reliability. When a data center uses as much power as a small city people and politicians notice. In some cases they are even banned. It is important that you understand the power that is being provided to your infrastructure provider. While rare, the top level data centers have redundant substations feeding their power. Also what is their electrical grid reliability? In 2003 a huge portion of the grid failed in the northern United States and Canada. Think about this for a moment as diesel generators don’t work well when they run out of fuel and no more can be pumped because they run on electric pumps.
- People Availability – Good service comes down to people that are good at communicating with you and diagnosing problems quickly. When there are skilled worker shortages server reliability will suffer. Check to see how they plan to keep good staff employed to assist you with your server.
- Redundancy – The more the better but it all costs money. You should make sure your provider has redundant electrical substations, redundant multi-homed carrier connections, redundant cooling systems, UPS Power and Diesel Generator power. As mentioned above redundant substations are really good as well. For the server redundant mirrored hard drives (RAID1) are usually the starting point. Redundant servers or load balancing is ideal if you have the budget and redundant servers located in separate data centers is even better. Remember that no level of redundancy will protect your data from a hacker or your error. You still need a backup plan – which is a whole other topic.
- Scalability – This is the most often overlooked part of server reliability. If your provider has a good scalability program you will not be down for days while you move your data to a bigger server. RackForce’s Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) program was specifically setup to address this and move data between servers with minimal (less than 10 minutes) of downtime. DDS will be described in detail on a future post.
- DDoS Prevention – Distributed Denial of Service Attacks are becoming a very large challenge. The attacker uses many “owned” pcs to attack a single IP. In some cases these attacks are measured by the Gigabits per second (Gbps). Many small providers cannot stop a 100 Megabit per second attack before their network fails. Find out what the provider’s DDoS protection strategy is and how large of an attack they can stop. Also DDoS attacks morph and get more sophisticated each time. What are they doing to deal with this?
- Security – A good firewall is vital if you can’t operate your own. Find out what your provider uses. Is it hardware based? How often is it updated? Does it also filter viruses and Trojans? Does it help combat your SPAM problem?
There are many businesses out there generating $10s to $100s of thousands of dollars a month from their web site and they are sitting in a small ISP server closet with a single data connection, no UPS or any other form of redundant back-up power. If this business was a storefront you would invest substantially in protecting your asset. Choosing a good infrastructure provider is just as important. I hope this short summary on what goes into server reliability was helpful. RackForce’s sales team will be happy to answer all these questions and more.
Good luck out there!
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