redundancy – Internetblog.org.uk

Hosting Company Shuts Down Blogging Service

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:00:21 +0000

The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

Server redundancy

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:36:12 +0000

In an ideal world, you get what you want all the time. The shopping lines are always short, the traffic is always light, and there are more jobs than there are people to fill them. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world, and just like a street can come to a stand-still when there is too much traffic, so can a server.

If you have a single server and its working, you might never suspect you would have a problem, but if too many people visit your server, some visitors could start getting denied access. Even worse, too much congestion can even bring a server down. With redundant servers, you can spread the load over two or more identical servers. The information across both is the same, so it does not matter which one a user gets when they access your site.

The other, perhaps more critical advantage of server redundancy is that even if one server goes down, the other one will continue to work. The more redundant servers you have, the more reliable your site will be. Generally speaking redundancy is probably not necessary for small, low-traffic sites, but for big sites that see huge volumes of regular users, it could be a life saver.

Photo Source: Flickr

What is Load Balancing?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:29:17 +0000

Among the web hosting terms you might come across and say to yourself, “Huh?” is the term load balancing. Simply put, load balancing is a method of balancing a server load, just as the name implies. If a web hosting company has some large clients on a few servers, they can distribute the load over many servers, sharing the “weight” so that those few servers are not bogged down.

“High availability can be defined as redundancy. If one server cannot handle a request, can other servers in the cluster handle it? In a highly available system, if a single Web server fails, then another server takes over, as transparently as possible, to process the request.”

If you are running a high-traffic website or other type of Internet service, such as IRC, a gaming server, etc., finding a web host that uses load balancing may be important to you. If you are running a small business site and use your site more as an online business card, load balancing may just be a term that is nice to know, but not necessarily relevant.

Source: O’Reilly OnJava.com
Photo: Flickr

Back it up once, back it up twice

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:38:14 +0000

If you own an Internet business and haven’t backed-up your data lately, you’re simply encouraging a disaster waiting to happen. Whether you own a dozen servers or have a small shared hosting account, at any time something could go wrong and your data could become history.

Why should you care about backing-up? According to a government study, a staggering 93% of companies that lose their data for a period longer than ten days end up filing for bankruptcy within a year. Of that number, half file immediately.

Yet many people do not make back-ups, or expect their web host to do so for them. All reputable hosts archive data regularly, but this is at the server level. They generally do not permit customer access to these back-ups. I’ve heard many horror stories over the years about a site being hacked or a web host closing where the victim failed to appropriately back-up his data.

Do yourself a favor and avert disaster by performing regular back-ups. It may not be immediately useful, but some day you will need the back-up and be thankful for it.