Sometimes I come across customers who complain that their websites are loading too slowly. Part of this reason can be due to the location of their server. However, this is the least of your problems when it comes to hosting your website. What is our prime importance is the reliability of the server.

Computers’ like human are equally susceptible to Nature’s forces of degeneration and decay. Over time, computers become old and breakdown, just as humans grow old and fall sick. This is as inevitable as the sun rising from the East. As a matter of fact, one of my friends who run a growing networking event mangement website, recently experienced a bout of server down times resulting in the corruption of data.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SmallBizSG/message/369

The important question to ask is: What will happen to your data in the event that your server finally calls it a day?

There are many ways to protect your data. One of the most common ways is to implement RAID, commonly known as Redundant Array of Inexpensive disks. RAID basically mirrors/duplicates a set of data between 2 or more harddisks. This ensures that even in the event of a harddisk failure, your web site will still load up fine.

199Web implements RAID on all our servers. In the event of a harddisk failure, the server will send a notification email to our administrator to inform him/her of the event. We will then proceed to remove the faulty harddisk and replace it with a new one. Once the new one is inserted, the internal hardware RAID card will duplicate your existing data into the new drive. All these can be done with no disruption to people accessing your website online!

However, in our view, RAID alone is insufficient to guarrantee the reliability needed in today’s internet landscape. Power outages at data centers do occur and, in some cases, destroy all data in a server. As a safe-guard against such eventualities, system administrators should perform regular backup of their data into a remote server.

199Web performs daily backup of all our data into a remote server. This helps to ensure high reliability of our systems and guarrantees that data loses will be limited to a day’s worth of transactions.