Low Cost Reliable Web Hosting
Redundancy and Failover

Low cost reliable web hosting:

Two of the best things to ever come along in the computer field are not new! In fact, they have been around for decades even before the invention of computers:

The concepts of:

1.) Redundancy.

2.) And failover.

These concepts are actually very simple ideas; when one part or computer fails, the idea is to simply switch over to another one.

Being able to do this quickly and without an interruption as opposed to the opposite is, in a nutshell the hallmarks of a good hosting service vs. one which is not so good irrespective of their low cost reliable web hosting package.

Network redundancy is the best (and most common) example of redundancy in action. Just as the name suggests, the internet is an assemblage of interconnected networks. There are paths among and between the different networks that make page requests and data transfers possible.

If there are more than two paths between two points (or "nodes") on a network, then it is not a disaster if one path becomes unusable because you can easily switch over to the next path. You can visualize this just as one street on a bridge can be closed for traffic and providing an alternate route which may be the opposite street.

And there we have the catch, when one path goes out of commission, the total amount of traffic doesn't change – there's just more cars on fewer streets, to continue the road analogy. Something similar happens when there are suddenly a dramatically larger number of "cars" on the road such as would happen in a huge speck of traffic like when a page gets to the front page of digg or get stumbled.

In this case, there is flooding of networks. Even worse is that some parts of the network may close to prevent even more flooding in case of a shared hosting account with limited bandwidth which can even lead to server failure.

A server can fail for a variety of reasons: overheating, memory problems, a bug in the operating system or any number of other reasons. Whatever the reason, when you have two or more servers set up so that one can take over if the other server fails, this is what is referred to as redundancy. More advanced web hosting companies do have redundancy built into their systems though.

That is one thing to think about when you are trying to determine which low cost reliable web hosting company will provide the best service for your website. Try to determine which company will step up and put things right when something goes wrong, since something always does eventually go wrong either in the short or long term no matter how good the web hosting company gets.

One company may just reboot when there is a problem. Some will have redundant disk arrays in case of failures. A server which has access to many drives can afford to have a disk fail without bringing down the entire system. The drive which has failed is replaced – and no one except the system administrator even knows that a problem has occurred.

Other low cost reliable web hosting firms may have even more sophisticated systems on hand. Failover servers to cover crashed servers – these are great since they allow for seamless failsafe operation in the event of a server crash. In the better hosting companies, these are standard. The end user has to at most refresh their web browser of there is an error.

Site owners should understand redundancy and failover in order to know why things fail and what can be done about it when it does happen. This information can lead them to be able to create a better experience for their visitors by choosing a good low cost reliable web hosting package that meets their website needs.