Why you need clustered hosting for your website

If you're an online business and you're not concerned with
guaranteed up-time, then you should be. People visit your
website twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of
the year, so every minute that it's not available due to server
problems or technical failures, is costing you money. Most
web hosting companies offer guaranteed up-times of 99% or even
99.9% - but they can never guarantee 100%. Servers can and
will go down occasionally, and even that 0.1% of downtime could
have an impact on your business. Web hosts know this, and one
of the ways they work to reduce that impact is through clustered
hosting. What is Clustered Hosting? To understand clustered
hosting, it helps to understand the more traditional model, which
is standalone server hosting. With this system, all web
services are run on one machine - everything from the website
control panel to the email server to file transfer protocols.
This is obviously a lot for a single machine to cope with.
You can see this with your own PC. If you have lots of
programs all running at the same time - email, web browsing, word
processing, anti-virus protection and so on - they inevitably run
slower than if you had just one or two running at the same
time. Use too many at once, and they start to slow down or
fail altogether. Exactly the same thing happens with standalone web
servers. Indeed, the problem is even more acute for web
hosting companies, because one server has to cope with multiple web
sites. So it's not difficult to imagine why websites go down
from time to time. You might even think it's something of a
miracle that they're available as often as they are!Clustered
hosting aims to alleviate this problem by sharing the burden of
running website programs across several servers. This is like
having multiple jet engines on an aircraft - if one or two fail,
the rest can keep the plane in the air until it's safe to
land. Clustered hosting protects each website from its
neighbors. If your website runs a particularly heavy
database, for instance, the fact that it's distributed across
several servers means that other websites won't be affected by what
you're doing, and vice versa. Clustered hosting also
minimizes the effects of sudden spikes in traffic or bandwidth
use.This is also a useful solution to the problem of rebooting and
upgrades. Rather than taking down the entire network when a
reboot is required, websites can be kept running on other servers
in the cluster whilst the reboot or software upgrade is rolled out
across individual servers by degrees. In the end, if you're looking
to host your business online, you need to make clustered hosting
part of your due diligence process. You need to know that
your web host understands the need not to put all their eggs in one
basket, and that the ever-increasing server load is spread out
across a clustered platform. Anything else could cost you
very dearly indeed.