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Written by Larry Dearing
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Sunday, 28 February 2010 15:00 |
On Saturday, February 20, 2010 during a routine fire suppression system inspection, something triggered the system and the release of Inergen gas throughout a large portion of WestHost's datacenter. This resulted in a large scale disruption of service lasting in many cases five plus days. WestHost is a quality company with a strong infrastructure with contingency planning in place for many events. If this sort of outage can occur to a quality host, is there anything you can do to help yourself in the event of a large scale, long duration outage by your service providers?
Forums, ecommerce sites, blogs; all types of websites were affected by this outage leaving many helplessly waiting as the hours ticked past knowing they were loosing visitor after visitor and in many cases customer after customer. If your site is a hobby, this is a mild inconvenience but if you're a professional or a serious community owner this is a catastrophe.
Communicating With Visitors and Customers
A fairly inexpensive way of protecting yourself might be a backup website at another hosting facility. Yes you're doubling up on your hosting cost, but as this backup site ideally won't be used much if at all, you can compromise with a less expensive plan. This is possible through the use of "fail-over dns" services provided by a number of vendors. We (Web Marietta) use DNS Made Easy and highly recommend them.
The way it works is they have your DNS records and when they sense that your main site has gone down, they automatically forward all requests to your backup site. In this way either a mirror of your website is served up to your visitors as if nothing happened, or if you use different informational page, you are able to communicate with your visitors as to the status of your main site. Either way, it's important that your customers and visitors to not think you simply "disappeared in the night."
Keeping Your Email Available
Another realization during a prolonged downtime is that if your email is on the same server as your website, you no longer have the ability to communicate via incoming or outgoing email as well. This situation is very common with most web hosts, especially those on shared cpanel accounts. One way of combating this is to search out a host that separates your email on dedicated email servers. Of course if it's in the same datacenter, you could still loose it. Many professionals find it important to have third party email vendors independent from their main web hosting provider.
For additional measures for just a few dollars a year you can have "store and forward" back up mail servers. Again we highly recommend the very reasonable services of DNS Made Easy. The way "store and forward" works is when your primary email server cannot be reached, the service automatically stores your email as it is received, and then when your primary email servers come back up, all the email is forwarded to it automatically. This way you will not "loose" incoming email. We recommend using both methods together.
Backing Up Your Website
A good web host will back up accounts nightly. What happens if in a major outage you discover these backups were destroyed? Do you have an off-site copy? Another realization of customers when there is a major outage or prolonged down time is that they should have kept current backups on their own. A good backup plan includes relying on your web host to provide quick and efficient restoration, but that failing, you should have your own back ups you can restore yourself or provide to your host.
What do you backup and how often? That depends on your website. Your website should be backed up every time there is a change. Most web masters aren't changing their site constantly and are backing up maybe monthly, downloading all site related files and folders for back up. Doing this manually from an FTP program or WEBDAV folder is fine.
What if your site changes daily, like a blog, forum, or online community? The good news here is the whole site structure is not necessarily changing and still only needs a full back up occasionally. What's changing in most cases here is the database that the dynamic content is stored in. With the help of your web hosting support reps, you can easily configure auto backups of these databases nightly with them automatically emailed to you. These database backups are in most cases very small.
Summary
In short, you must ultimately take responsibility for how stable and reliable your web presence is. Pick your web host based on their track record and support, but ultimately it is your responsibility. Some steps you should consider are first of all find a way to communicate with your visitors if your main site is down. This can be a mirror site or a simple info page you can update regularly during your main site outage. You should also consider moving your business or webmaster email away from your web hosting site to make sure your email communication is not affected. Lastly, review your back plan, or create one so that you can easily restore or move to another hosting facility on your own.
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Additional Resources:
Postshadow.com (Our Partner) - for off-site email - web hosting
Web Marietta - for more information or help in developing your plans
DNS Made Easy - for third party dns services, failover-dns, store and forward email
"We're Redundant" Blog Article from Web Marietta explaining more detail how fail-over DNS websites work
"FAQs"
What Is A Backup Mail Server?
What Is Store-and-Forward Backup Email?
What is DNS - How Does It Work?
What is Fail Over DNS? |
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