High availability is a highly sought-after feature in every web hosting plan. If you are wondering why, then you will find out soon. First, let us understand what high availability is, especially in the context of website hosting. But before that we need to talk about the service of web hosting.
Everything about Website Hosting
Every website
that can be accessed on the World Wide Web has availed the service of website
hosting from some service provider or the other, in order to become accessible
to site visitors. Availing this service is a must, if a site needs to be
available on the Internet. Web hosting, which is made available through various
website hosting plans, provides web server space to host the files of websites.
It also offers all the services and the technologies that are needed to make
websites accessible.
The files of
those websites that have availed the service of web hosting, get stored on web
servers of the service provider. Once the server receives incoming request,
over the Internet for the stored content, it locates the corresponding files in
its storage. This request is generated by the web browser of the site visitor
that is looking for a particular site. The files are processed on the web
server, based on the incoming request for the content, and are delivered over
the Internet to the same web browser for rendering the website accessible.
Different types
of website hosting are made available for fulfilling the hosting requirements
of different types of sites. Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Reseller
Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, etc., are the main types of website
hosting services that are provided by most of the website hosting companies,
such as HTS Hosting, which is
globally well-known as the best Website Hosting
Company and as the best Windows Hosting
Company.
Every website
hosting service serves the same function of making websites accessible online
but the way that is attained is different in every service. Shared Hosting,
makes sites accessible by hosting many sites on a single server. The web
servers used in Dedicated Hosting host a single site on a single server. A
Virtual Private Server (VPS) uses Virtualization Technology to provide
dedicated server resources to each of those multiple hosted sites that coexist
on a single physical server that gets virtually partitioned into multiple,
isolated, private, virtual servers. The other two types of hosting services are
meant for specific users. WordPress Hosting caters to the specific hosting
requirements of WordPress sites and enhances such sites’ security and performance.
Reseller Hosting is a web hosting service that is meant for those that want to
earn from the business of reselling the web hosting services of established,
professional web hosting service providers.
Regardless of the
type of website hosting that is availed, the presence of some features is very
important in every web hosting service, for the seamless availability of the
hosted site. Some of these important features are fast speed, powerful
security, data backup facility, round-the-clock expert technical support, high
availability, etc. Next, we shall touch upon the feature of high availability
and the importance of its presence in website hosting plans.
To digress, HTS
Hosting provides a wide range of website hosting plans, at very affordable prices,
to keep all the hosted sites up and running at all times and seamlessly
available at fast speed through its fully secure hosting services. The best Windows Hosting service can be
availed through any of the Windows Hosting plans of HTS Hosting at massively
discounted prices. HTS Hosting excels at providing all types of feature-rich hosting
plans for Linux at prices that are budget-friendly. You can avail the best Linux Hosting plans
from HTS Hosting to boost the performance of your site.
Now let us
discuss one of the most important features of any web hosting service or plan,
high availability.
High
Availability: A Must-have Web Hosting Feature
High availability
refers to that characteristic of a system which is meant for ensuring an agreed
level of operational performance (uptime) for a duration that is higher than
the normal period. The increased reliance on such a system can be clearly
witnessed in many sectors, such as data centres, wherein high availability of
the system (web servers) is required for carrying out routine operational
activities. In this context, availability refers to the user community’s
ability to access the system. In the event that a user cannot access the
system, it is referred to as unavailable to that user. The duration for which a
system is unavailable, is referred to as the downtime for that system.
Downtime, which
is the opposite of uptime, can be either scheduled or unscheduled downtime.
Scheduled downtime is caused by such maintenance which cannot be avoided and
which is management-initiated. Events related to scheduled downtime include
patches to system software which need a reboot or changes related to system
configuration which take effect post a reboot. On the other hand, unscheduled
downtime events are caused by certain physical events, such as software and/or
hardware failure or environmental anomaly. Power outages, security breaches,
failure of CPU or RAM components or the failure of various middleware,
operating system and application, physically or logically severed network
connections, etc. are some of the examples of unscheduled downtime events.
Regardless of the type of downtime, it is highly undesirable when the
requirement of a system is high availability.
High availability
can be attained through the following principles of system design:
- Elimination of single points of failure, wherein redundancy is added or built into the system. This ensures that the failure of a component does not result in the failure of the entire system.
- Detection of failures as soon as these take place.
- Ensuring the reliability of
the crossover point, as the crossover point tends to become a single point of
failure in redundant systems.
Availability and
uptime can be used interchangeably as long as the systems being discussed are
kept the same. Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a
given year. With regard to website hosting, uptime indicates the amount of time
for which a web server remains up and running. Uptime can also be referred to
as the duration for which a website or a web service is available to its users
in any given period of time. Uptime or availability percentage is calculated by
dividing uptime by the total time. This ratio is calculated in monthly or
yearly increments.
Uptime or
availability provides a useful way of ascertaining the capability of a web
hosting service provider, when it comes to keeping its systems (web servers) up
and running. If a hosting service provider offers a high uptime percentage
(high availability), then it indicates that its servers remain up and running
seamlessly and the site/sites hosted on such servers remain accessible at all
times to the site visitors. High availability of web servers ensures that these
are available uninterruptedly for the browsers of site visitors to communicate
with the servers and retrieve the files of the sites from the web servers
without any hindrance. Since the web pages of a site become inaccessible to
site visitors when the server experiences downtime, it is extremely important
to opt for such web hosting plans that guarantee high availability and keep
your site seamlessly accessible online.
Despite 100%
uptime being the goal, the industry standard is 99.999% uptime, which is referred
to as high availability. 99.999% uptime, wherein the annual downtime cannot
exceed 5.26 minutes, is often referred to as not only high availability but
also as “five-nines availability”.
The significance
of high availability can be understood when a site visitor lands on your site
and has to look for another similar site as your site doesn’t load and is
inaccessible due to server downtime. As per reports, the probability of a site
visitor returning to a site after having a bad experience dwindles. Downtimes
prove to be counterproductive when website owners continuously invest their
time and money and direct their efforts to drive traffic to their websites. If a
site is unavailable due to server downtime, then all the efforts in directing
web traffic to the site, bite the dust. It goes without saying that the
inaccessibility of your site on the Internet, impacts the success of your
website adversely. Server downtime usually causes loss in sales for online
stores and missed opportunities with regard to lead generation as well as
tarnishes the image and the credibility of the business owning such a site.
Hence, the importance of availing a web hosting service or plan that assures
high availability of your site cannot be overemphasized.
Before concluding,
it needs to be mentioned that HTS Hosting, a globally trusted and preferred web
hosting company, offers a wide range of affordably priced web hosting plans
that guarantee high availability of your site, its safe functioning at fast
speed and its peak performance at affordable prices.
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