Hosting & single point of failure.

[blizz]

I want to understand the issue our hosting company points out with my server.

The hosting company said this:

Currently you are hosting on a single server which gives you a single point of failure. With a more sophisticated solution like an Enterprise cluster or VMware, you will get that uptime and redundancy
Click to expand...

What does it mean? Most people I assume have only one server and some CDN i.e. cloudflare or other in front and doing great.

Can some of the Gurus explain why we will have this failure?

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[username84447]

It means if your server goes down, your website goes down. Having a 'backup server' means if your website server goes down then it just starts pointing to the backup one and your end user doesn't notice anything.

How important is it that your website is up 99.9999% of the time as opposed to 99.9% of the time? Is it ok if it's offline a few hours each year?

If it's ok to be down a small amount each year then a single server is fine, they should even tell you what uptime they guarantee.

If it's absolutely imperative that your website is up as much as possible, and every minute of downtime is costing you money then you may want to consider what they're saying.

 

[holywater]

if your service needs to be up 24/7, You might consider cloud service like AWS or Multiple servers with load balancer. If it is not that important, You just need to do backup on somewhere else regularly.

 

[JohnLocke]

Thank you for the question and answer I was looking for exact same information 🙂

So if I understand it correct there is no need for a redundant server setup unless you can't afford to be down an hour or two? The website will be able to receive the same number of visitors on a single server as of a redundant server setup correct?

 

[melzvy]

yes, in most cases (not all) redundancy is driven by revenue.

yes, but do not to confuse redundancy with capacity, these are 2 different things.

if you go for redundancy then you may have the next options:

active - active; you have redundancy and you will double the capacity at the same time, in most cases both servers are kind of "mirrored".
active - passive; if your primary server goes down or gets data corrupted or something bad happens, you fail over to the standby server. your standby server is independent from the primary.

Some CDN's like cloudflare are capable to cache your site content for some time if your server is down, you need to configure this is not by default, it can be an option in some cases.

 

[JohnLocke]

really good advise. Loadbalancing is the solution to avoid interruption and double the capacity of visitors.

 

[JohnLocke]

I quickly want to add, the solution beside what is suggested here and that is most important is to have a Team onboard that has technical & professional knowledge about securing and setting up a server, so to use the protection services available i.e. cloudflare etc.

We have found such a Team and are happy with their work.

 

[leaveNet]

great. I work in offensive and defensive IT Security. Let me know if you need a second/third opinion.

 

[JohnLocke]

If you think there is something we need to do here you are welcome to either PM me or use the contact form, I'm all ears 😉