Web hosting Reliability: 8 tips to get 100% Uptime

Web hosting Reliability: 8 tips to get 100% Uptime

green cartoon man next to chart and servers

You deploy a new website or server with the greatest optimism. Unfortunately, it frequently goes down when you least expect it. Does this sound familiar? If you’re like most people, you’ve been frustrated by downtime and the harm it can cause your website or business. However, don’t worry; we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll look at a few typical reasons why services go down and offer some advice for improving uptime.

What affects web hosting reliability, and how can it be improved?

There are many factors that can impact your web hosting reliability, and achieving true 100% uptime is nearly impossible. Even so, excellent uptime is within reach! Here are 8 ideas to help in your pursuit of perfect uptime:

1. Pick a trustworthy hosting company

Maintaining high uptime can be achieved by selecting a hosting company with a solid track record of uptime and good infrastructure. Choose a company who is dedicated to uptime and has redundant systems. To gauge the provider’s dependability, be sure to look at their uptime statistics and read user reviews. Webhostingtalk.com is an excellent resource for legitimate user reviews. This is because, unlike 99.9% of “hosting review” sites out there, webhostingtalk does not “review” hosting providers based on how much they pay for the privilege.

2. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

A CDN will distribute your material across a global network of servers to help you improve uptime. This allows your content to still be delivered from another location even if one server goes down. The load on your server can be reduced with the use of CDNs as well, boosting overall performance and lowering the possibility of server failure. Additionally, CDNs can be used to mask the real IP address of your server, making it more difficult for DDoS assaults or other hacking attempts to take down your website. A very popular and easy to use CDN is Cloudflare, which has both free and paid options.

3. Use high availability load balancing

By dividing incoming traffic across several servers and switching over immediately to a backup server in the event of a failure, high availability load balancing can assist in enhancing uptime. HAProxy, NGINX, and F5 BIG-IP are a few examples of software frequently used for this purpose. By spreading the demand across different servers, load balancing can ensure that your service remains operational even if one of your servers is unavailable. It can also keep your website online when performance demands are too great for a single server. In addition to these software load balancers, “round robin dns” can achieve similar results for simpler websites.

4. Monitor your service

By routinely keeping an eye on your service, you can notice performance problems early and take appropriate action to resolve them. To help identify and treat problems, you can utilize tools like uptime monitors (like Pingdom or Site24x7) and log analysis services (like Splunk or Logz.io). Make sure to configure notifications so that you are informed if there are any service issues.

5. Have a backup plan

Despite your best efforts, service interruptions will happen eventually. By putting a backup plan in place, you can lessen the effects of downtime and restore your service as soon as feasible. This can involve things like creating data backups, putting a disaster recovery plan in place, and putting policies in place to deal with unplanned downtime. Make sure to frequently test your backup plan to make sure it will work if something goes wrong.

6. Make sure autopay is enabled for your services

Downtime brought on by billing issues can be annoying and unnecessary. Make sure that all of your services are set up for automatic payment to prevent this so that you don’t have to worry about making manual payments or missing deadlines.

7. Host your service in multiple data centers

By spreading out the risk of a single point of failure, hosting your service in multiple data centers can help you boost uptime. Your service can still be accessed from another location even if one data center goes down. This is even better if the two datacenters are managed by different companies, because issues with contracts, reports of abuse, and other administrative disagreements can be an unexpected source of downtime.

8. Backups should be kept off-site using a different hosting provider

Consider storing backups off-site with a different organization to help lower the chance of downtime caused by everything from natural disasters to contractual disagreements. By doing this, you can make sure that your data is accessible even in the event that your primary hosting provider experiences a service interruption or purposefully cuts you off.

Preparation can make all the difference.

In summary, downtime is a regrettable but unavoidable aspect of maintaining a website or server. You can, however, take efforts to improve your service’s uptime and give users a better experience by paying attention to the advice offered in this article. While achieving 100% uptime may not be attainable, doing the following actions may help you reduce downtime and keep your service functioning properly almost all the time.

Do you love servers?

We do! Contact IOFlood at sales[@]ioflood.com if you’re interested in hosting your website or server with a company that is dedicated to uptime and reliability, or visit our available dedicated servers page at https://ioflood.com to see what’s available. If you’re searching for a dedicated server, our team of professionals is here to help you get the most of your hosting experience. We put a lot of effort into making sure your service is always accessible to your users because we recognize the value of uptime. To find out more about how we can assist you in obtaining the uptime required for your company or website, get in touch with us right away.