Features of High Availability Dedicated Servers
These days, businesses heavily depend on the internet. Even the shortest downtime period can be detrimental to any business. Hence, it is important to choose the best hosting provider that guarantees at least 99% uptime. Let’s now understand what a high-availability dedicated server is.
A high-availability dedicated server is an excellent system that comes with a fully redundant network, backups, power supplies, and raid disk towers. This ensures high uptime and reliability. In this blog, we will discuss some features of high-availability dedicated servers.
Some High Availability Dedicated Server Features
Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of efficiently distributing website traffic across a group of web servers. A load balancer is the software or hardware that offers load-balancing functionality.
A load balancer works to evenly distribute visitor requests across multiple dedicated servers. This ensures that the dedicated server hosting all visitors’ requests is taken care of without compromising speed and properly utilising all the dedicated servers.
When visitors try to access your website, they first connect to the load balancer. Then, the load balancer directs them to a server. In case a server fails or crashes, the load balancer quickly redirects the visitors to an available online server.
As your website grows and starts experiencing an increase in website traffic, you can quickly and easily add new servers to your load-balanced server. As you add a new server, the load balancer will automatically start sending requests to it without any need for user intervention.
There are three ways of performing load balancing- load balancing through hardware, load balancing through software, and load balancing through DNS.
Failover System
In case your primary network or server experiences failure, failover will quickly switch to a standby network or server. This means that in the case that the primary server needs maintenance or goes down, the secondary host will quickly step forward to support the workload.
This provides a level of seamless and uninterrupted operations that ensures users do not even notice that anything went wrong. The workings of a failover are quite easy to understand. Its infrastructure includes two identical servers – a primary and a secondary server.
However, for monitoring, failover uses a third server. It regularly monitors the workings of the primary server and identifies any issues. Additionally, it diverts the website traffic to the secondary server by automatically updating DNS records.
When the primary server is functional again, website traffic is diverted back to the primary server. Most of the time, visitors do not notice this back-and-forth between primary and secondary servers.
High Availability Clusters
A group of servers that works to support server applications is known as a high-availability cluster. You may need high availability for several reasons such as failover servers, backup systems, and load balancing. The most common and popular high availability cluster configurations are Active-active high availability cluster and Active-passive high availability cluster.
Active-active high availability cluster includes at least two nodes. Both these nodes actively run identical services. It is the most suited option for achieving perfect load balancing. The workload is evenly distributed among the nodes ensuring good reading/writing speed and improved response time.
Active-passive high availability cluster also includes at least two nodes. However, unlike active-active high availability clusters, not all nodes run actively. The secondary node stays in standby or passive mode. Active-passive high availability clusters are best suited for failover clusters.
To Wrap It Up
Features like failover, high availability cluster, and load balancing help build a robust infrastructure that ensures continuous uptime and seamless website operation. Hence, you must choose the right dedicated hosting provider that offers the highest uptime, as downtime increases the risk of loss of visitors and sales.