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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