Hosting Your Own Website: Reliability
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One of the largest issues for anyone who is considering moving their website to their own server is the reliability of hosting your own website. When you are working with a professional web host, chances are that they have numerous technologies in place to prevent their websites from going down for any extended period of time. When you are working with your own server, you do not automatically have that kind of protection.
It is very important that your website is available for your customers/visitors to access at all times. It is the nature of the Internet that everything is available 24/7. If a visitor comes to your website and just receives an error, they will be frustrated and may not try to return later. You may have just lost a customer.
In order to reduce the number of missed potential customers, web hosts seek to reach up-time guarantees of 99.9% or even more. This kind of figure cannot be achieved without a good deal of effort. Things to worry about include: power outages, hardware failures, software failures, necessary maintenance, and any number of unforeseen circumstances. Basically, the web hosts have to do everything that they can to make sure that the websites are not unavailable unless they are aware of it beforehand.
When moving websites to your own server, it is important to strive for the same standards that the professional web hosts set. Although you are not worrying about losing clients who are mad that their website is down, you are worried about losing customers when they are unable to visit your website. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of effort and money to achieve the kind of results that you need.
A lot of reliability issues can be improved by renting/buying space in a server bank. They will have backup generators and the proper conditions to keep your hardware working as well as possible. However, there are still plenty of issues that you must address yourself if you are to have a maximum level of availability.
Next: Physical Reliability >>
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