Web Site Hosting has essentially become a commodity. There is very little distinguishing one hosting company to the next. master plans and features are the same and price is no longer a real property determination. In fact, the choice of a series based on the cheapest price may be more costly in the long term with regard to reliability problems and the possible loss of sales as a result of site downtime.

Selecting a host of thousands of suppliers and distributors can be a very daunting task, which can result in a hit and miss approach. But despite the host may become a commodity, a distinctive feature that should always be taken into consideration is reliability.

At the heart of the reliability of any hosting company is redundancy. This ensures that if there is a problem at any given time, there will be an alternative which ensures continuity as seemlessly and transparently as possible.

Most armies use redundant network connections. These are the high speed pipes that route data from the server to your web browser. However, “multiple web servers’ redundant have been extremely rare and very expensive, requiring costly routing equipment which has previously been used only in mission critical applications for Fortune 500 companies.

However, very clean, but little known Domain Name Server (DNS) feature called ’round robin’ allows the selection and provision of an IP address from a ‘pool’ of addresses when a DNS request arrives.

To understand what this has to do with server reliability is important to remember that the Domain Name Server (DNS) maps database host name to IP address. So instead of using a hard to remember a series of numbers (IP address) we just write your web browser www.yourdomain.com, to get to your website.

Now, usually takes at least 2 to 3 days to propagate or spread the word of your DNS information through Internet. That’s why when you register or transfer a domain name is not immediately available for browsing the web.

This delay has stymied the security benefits of hosting your site on multiple servers, since their site would be for a couple of days if something went wrong with a server. You have to change your DNS to reflect your second server and wait days before the change was reflected in the routers on the Internet.

However, the round robin DNS strategy solves this situation by allocating your domain name more than one IP address.

Selection of hosting companies now employ the DNS round robin technique “with’failover joint monitoring.

DNS round robin failover monitoring process starts by a web hosting company setting up your site in two or more independent web servers (preferably with different IP blocks assigned to them.) Your domain name, therefore, have two or more IP addresses assigned.

Then the failover monitor watches your web server (s) by sending data to a URL you specify and the particular text search results. When the system detects that one of its IP address returns an error, and others are not, which pulls the IP address of the list. The DNS then points your domain name with the IP address work / s.

If any of your intellectual property has come back online to be restored to the research group. The efficacy and safety remains online site, even if one of your web servers does not work.

Fault detection and mean time to recovery with a system like this can be as low as 15 minutes. This time varies depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the fault and also the time of other ISP cache (store) information from DNS.

The time required for the caching of other ISPs your data may be manipulated in the failover monitor by lowering the “time to live” (TTL) cache settings. These are the values that other ISPs are used to determine the duration of the cache of DNS information.

Of course we must take into account the issue of how frequently data is synchronized between servers in your website. This will be the responsibility of the hosting company, and this may be complicated where databases and user sessions are involved.

The very expensive hardware based failover systems of surveillance that point a virtual IP address to another ISP, while behind the scenes juggling a number of unique IP addresses on different servers, is of course the more elegant “multi-server solution overnight.

Thus, the whole issue of ISP’s caching your information does not come into play.

Therefore, for the site that you need to have a 99.99995% uptime, without huge expenditures of money, the technology is available and some proprietary systems for surveillance failure are now relatively inexpensive to implement.