Actively Mirrored systems:
100% redundant
We find it laughable when a hosting provider running web content
from a single server in a single location "guarantees" that your service
will have 99.99% up-time. This means that they are guaranteeing that your service
will be down no more than 4.38 minutes in any given month.
Even a preventive maintenance shutdown is likely to take your
service off-line for 20 minutes. If your server kernel-panics, or otherwise
crashes, the minimum time to bring it back on line is probably 30 to 40 minutes,
if instantly detected - detection is never "instant." We marvel when
a server runs for 200 days straight without a panic. Such clean events as preventive
reboots and panics will occur several times a year in a normal server.
If the broken system has a serious hardware problem it may be
days before it is back on line. Similarly, restoring data from tape onto another
machine (if daily saves are made) is a multi-hour complex reconstruction process
that can only begin after a hoster determines that a primary server is "dead."
Even guaranteeing 99.9% uptime (no more than 52 minutes downtime
in a month) is difficult in a single server and location environment, though
practicable in most months. But the bottom line with most guarantees is that
the hoster promises to give you some money back (most often pro-rata) if you
find out that you were down in a given month.
What matters more than promises is designed reliability.
Easy Computing Company has hosting centers in two different locations:
California and Pennsylvania.
We offer you the ultimate in Internet technological reliability
- mirrored servers.
When your content simultaneously runs on two different machines
using two different sources of bandwidth, your service keeps running in spite
of common failures, because the browsers accessing the server will automatically
switch to the alternate server in about 30 seconds if they do not get a response
from the primary. Both servers must fail before service is fully interrupted.
The statistical odds of twin failures, as we design for 99.9% average reliability,
are 0.1% of 0.1%, or 0.0001%.
To our knowledge, no other company offers actively mirrored hosting
service at our reasonable prices and as part of a standard service. Active mirroring
is normally an extremely expensive option. Our search of the web suggests that
the next-least-expensive offering effectively starts at around $200 per month,
with most solutions costing thousands of dollars per month. Similarly, others
offering active mirroring do not provide the transparent synchronization we
include -- instead, you are responsible for moving content twice. The difference
is that we have invested in the engineering to make it a mass-marketable product
at reasonable prices.
Here's what mirroring means to you:
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Prevent data loss. Your data is safely stored on
two machines. Some suppliers explicitly don't make a copy of your data,
others are ambiguous about it. Those that do promise archiving invariably
store it on tape, and are likely to charge you a significant restoration
fee because recovery may take several man-hours of their time. Only the
EasyCo mirroring process assures protection and ready accessibility. |
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Virtually no downtime. Your service can normally
only fail if we get two simultaneous failures at the same time. When you
serve from two servers, each designed for better than 99.9% overall reliability,
the odds of both going down at the same time are about 1/1000% - 24 seconds
in a year. |
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Virtually 100%
connectivity rather than 97%. As discussed in our article
on MultiPathing, mirroring, as a variant of MultiPathing reduces the odds
of users being unable to connect to your site from 3% to 3% of 3%. |
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