Uptime & Servers
We know that it does not do much good to have a web site that is not online. When your web site is down so are your emails and your online business is unavailable to your customers. This is the #1 area of customer frustration in web hosting and it is the #1 area that our quality assurance team focuses their attention to prevent server failures.
Here are the ways we manage our servers and maintain our 99.9% uptime.
Quality Hardware And Data Center
It is essential that in today’s web hosting environment that a web hosting company purchases high quality servers. Server requirements vary radically in a number of areas including disk space, processor speed and connectivity capabilities. Some companies purchase servers with low requirements in some or all of the essential areas, Ecolohosting.com does not. We purchase robust energy efficient servers with Intel Dual Quad Core Xeon processors, 8GB ram, Large Raid 10 storage arrays for maximum performance & redundancy along with 100 Mbps connectivity to our switches.
In addition our servers are housed in a world class co-location data facility with raised floors, dual city power grid feeds with backup power generators. The facility boasts an FM 200 fire suppression system with early pre-fire detection mechanisms. The facility is staffed by administrators and security personnel 24x7x365, including biometric and key card security systems with a rack level locking mechanism.
The Amount Of Clients On A Server
Too many clients can overload a server in the disk space, bandwidth and processor usage. Unlike some of our competitors Ecolohosting.com does not try to squeeze as many clients as possible onto a server. We gladly sacrifice some of the profit we could make by adding more customers onto a server by not adding those “extra” and thereby lowering the server workload to ensure that it is running at optimal levels.
Pro-active & Reactive Server Monitoring
Server monitoring is an essential part of what we do to proactively ensure that any potential problems on any of our servers are addressed quickly before issues arise. We have a 10 second monitoring system on every one of our servers and the services that run on them, such as HTTPD, MySQL, EXIM (Mail) and other critical services. This allows our system administrators to be notified of a failure within 10 seconds, which results in a quick resolution time to any service interruptions that may occur.
On top of our reactive 10 second server/service monitoring, we’re proactively monitoring the servers health in real-time. This serves as our early warning system which allows our system administrators to quickly identify problems and temporarily kill any processes that could potentially cause extended periods of downtime. If an abusive client or script is identified as causing repeated load spikes on the server that is affecting service, the clients account is suspended until we are able to work directly with the client to resolve the issue. Clients who are identified as abusers are removed.
Nightly Backups
In the event that a server has a catastrophic failure, Ecolohosting.com has a complete backup all of our clients’ web site data. In the event that we determine that a server has an unrecoverable system failure, we can quickly provision those clients onto a new standby server at a moments notice.
Conclusion – Our uptime guarantee and how we maintain our servers.
Server uptime is of great importance to our company. We understand that this is essential for our clients and we take uptime very seriously. Our robust hardware and world class data facility as well as the lower amount of clients we have on a server and our pro-active/reactive service monitoring permits us to run at absolute efficiency and maintain our great service record. In the event that a hardware failure is beyond recoverable we have backups of our clients’ data and we are able to get their web sites back up quickly and efficiently.
