Very high availability hosting: how it works

Discover how a very high availability hosting works and how to 100% guarantee the availability of a website.

Very high availability: the very best and most up to date in hosting

The principle of a very high availability hosting is to guarantee total and continued availability for websites or online services.

Unlike a shared hosting, a cloud server or even a dedicated server, very high availability hostings guarantee a complete redundancy and reliability for your services under any circumstances. If the unthinkable should happen (breakdown of a server or an entire datacentre), your online services would continue to function normally and without interruption, and this commitment is contractually guaranteed depending on your requirements.

The modalities of a very high availability hosting are defined in a SLA contract, which offers important guarantees to clients in case of non-compliance of commitments set by the hosting service provider. As each situation involves specific needs depending on the client’s environment, these contracts are generally defined to suit, and the client benefits from personalised support to implement and maintain their infrastructure.

How a very high availability infrastructure works

In order to guarantee the total reliability and availability of online services, the infrastructure of a very high availability hosting is based on several web servers and databases distributed around different datacentres.

 

As this diagram shows, the requests of visitors to a site hosted with this technology are managed by a couple of load balancers whose role is to contact the available servers, which continuously optimises the resource management and the performance of the whole infrastructure. The strength of this type of hosting is that the data is always replicated in at least two datacentres, which guarantees their availability regardless of what happens.

7 criteria for choosing a very high availability hosting

Choosing a very high availability hosting is an important decision for a company’s risk management, as this can have very important consequences for the activities which are associated with your servers’ proper function.

In order to guarantee the availability of your online services, it is important to bear in mind the following criteria:

1. Location and reliability of the datacentres: do the hosting service provider’s datacentres have a n+1 redundancy at the level of the services which are essential to their working well?
2. Evolutivity and flexibility of the infrastructure: Is it possible to easily and without interruption increase the power of the servers? Do you have the option of adding additional servers if necessary?
3. Replicating data: do you have to manually replicate the databases and files between the different servers or is this taken care of automatically by your hosting service provider?
4. Guaranteed uptime: what is the availability rate guaranteed by the hosting service provider in the contract?
5. Support: do you benefit from a personalised support when it comes to your development environment? Does the hosting service provider assist you in sizing and optimising your infrastructure? Can you contact the hosting service provider’s technical team 24/7?
6. Price and transparency of the deal: is the hosting deal transparent? Are the respective responsibilities and requirements clearly specified in a SLA contract?
7. The environment: is the hardware used by the hosting service provider efficient in terms of electricity consumption? Are their datacentres environmentally friendly? Does the hosting service provider offset its CO2 emissions?

The Infomaniak Very High Availability Cloud hosting

The strengths of our very high availability infrastructure are numerous:

• our Tier 3+ datacentres are environmentally-friendly and ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 certified
• 2 load balancers
• from 2 Web Cloud cluster servers
• from 3 database Could cluster servers
• complete flexibility of the infrastructure thanks to our Cloud infrastructure
• customised SLA contract with guaranteed uptime up to 100%
• unlimited traffic and professional anti-DDoS protection
• support and advice throughout the partnership
• Swiss Made solution hosted and managed entirely in Switzerland
• 24/7 support and monitoring

To find out more

• Infomaniak’s Very High Availability Cloud Hosting
• How to choose your hosting