Preventing Disruptions Caused by Downtime or Data Center Outages

August 3, 2015

If you conduct transactions through a website or use hosted applications in the cloud, one of your main concerns is probably the reliability of your hosting provider. Even though most data centers provide very reliable services, data center outages still happen and continue to be a big problem for businesses that need to maintain an online presence at all times.

Downtime and data center outages are a big source of frustration for Internet users who cannot access the resources that they want. Remember that for every minute that your website or online application is down, some visitors may instead choose to go with a competitor.

Why Data Center Outages Happen

Industry surveys have found that the vast majority of data centers in the United States experience at least one downtime outage in a given year. Many data centers also experience several partial outages, which are failures that only affect certain server racks rather than the entire center.

Power outages, combined with UPS battery failures, are among the most common causes of data center outages. Cyber attacks and IT equipment failure are also frequent culprits. While many outages are resolved relatively quickly, even a short disruption can carry a steep economic cost for a business that depends on constant uptime.

Choosing a Reliable Hosting Partner

All of this means that if you want to ensure that your site stays up all the time, you should choose a hosting partner that has servers in a reliable data center. The best cloud hosting providers will offer you a service uptime guarantee. They also structure their data center to minimize potential failures. This includes monitoring operations around the clock and maintaining multiple, redundant power sources that can take over in the event of a grid failure. It also means being carrier neutral, so that one particular carrier failure will not cause the entire data center to go offline.