With everything and businesses around the world going digital, experiencing downtime on your website, especially as a business owner can really affect your business, leading to loss of revenue and reducing your customer’s trust.
HarmonWeb understands how important it is to maintain uptime and we have implemented different measures in place to ensure our services remain robust and reliable and protect our clients’ websites from downtime.
In this article, we have outlined key strategies that HarmonWeb has put in place to prevent downtime.
What Is Website Downtime?
Website downtime is a period when a website can’t be accessed by users. This may be due to server overload, hardware failure, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. If downtime is not managed properly, it can result in the website having lower search engine rankings and also affect the conversion rate of the site due to missed opportunities.
Why Preventing Website Downtime Is Important?
Experiencing downtime on your website can really affect the credibility of your brand especially if it occurs on your business website.
Imagine users coming to your website to make a purchase and they end up getting an error message telling them that your website is unavailable. They may turn to a competitor, costing you potential revenue.
Negative Implications of Website Downtime
- Lost Revenue: Downtime can lead to missed sales and revenue.
- Reputation Damage: Frequent downtime can erode customer trust.
- Lower Rankings: Search engines factor in uptime when determining rankings.
- Security Risks: Downtime can make your site more vulnerable to attacks.
Understanding these consequences and how they can affect our client’s business success, HarmonWeb has put in place measures to prevent downtime on any of our services.
What Causes Website Downtime
There are several factors that can cause websites to experience downtime, including:
- Server Problems: Server outages can result from hardware failures or software glitches.
- Software Update Errors: Update errors due to compatibility issues or improper installation can cause downtime.
- Traffic Spikes: Sudden traffic surges can overwhelm server resources, causing slowdowns or inaccessibility.
- Security Breach: Hackers can disrupt services, damage pages, or steal data, making robust security measures essential.
- DDoS Attacks: Attackers use botnets to overwhelm servers, making sites inaccessible. Robust DDoS countermeasures are essential.
Strategic Measures HarmonWeb Has Put In Place To Prevent Downtime
- Redundant Infrastructure (High Availability Setup): At HarmonWeb, we have a high availability setup to ensure that our infrastructure stays running, and in the case of an unexpected failure, we don’t experience any service interruption. For instance, if one of our servers were to go down, our redundant infrastructure means that we have multiple servers ready to take over action immediately. This setup involves having duplicate systems and components that can seamlessly take over if one fails, minimising the risk of downtime and keeping our services running smoothly.
- Failover Systems: We have failover systems that work like a well-coordinated relay team and are ready to automatically switch over to a standby server or system if the primary server experiences any failure. The switchover process happens so quickly that you won’t even notice the switch has occurred. This immediate switchover ensures that our servers stay running uninterrupted, providing our clients with continuous access to their websites.
- Geographic Redundancy: To further enhance our reliability when it comes to preventing our clients’ websites from experiencing downtime, HarmonWeb has servers deployed in different geographic locations. This is like having your valuable data stored in different safes located in different cities. If there are any issues in one location, it won’t affect you at all as servers in other locations will take over and keep your service running continuously. This not only prevents downtime but also ensures that users experience faster load times by connecting to the nearest server.
- Weekly Off-site Backups: At HarmonWeb, we perform weekly off-site backups to safeguard our clients’ data and ensure quick recovery if there is ever data loss or corruption. Off-site backup means that all important data of our clients are being copied and stored in a secure location that is separate from our main servers. This way, your data is protected against potential disasters like fire or flood, and the backed-up data can be restored quickly without any disruption to our service.
- 24/7 Monitoring & Alerts: Our dedicated technical team monitors all systems and services 24/7 using advanced monitoring tools and alert systems. Imagine having a security guard who never sleeps, constantly alert to detect any signs of trouble in our systems. With these monitoring tools, we are alert at the first sign of an issue, allowing us to fix any problems right at the start before they cause any impact that may affect any of our services.
- Optimised Resource Allocation for Shared Hosting Users: Shared hosting environments can be particularly vulnerable to downtime due to resource contention. At Harmonweb, we optimize resource allocation to ensure fair and efficient use among shared hosting users. This means we carefully manage how server resources like CPU, memory, and storage are distributed among users so that every user gets a fair share of resources allocated to their services without impacting other users. For more details on how resources are allocated, you can read our blog post here.
- Firewalls and DDoS Protection: We have robust firewalls and DDoS protection in place to protect all of our client’s services in our network from malicious attacks. This firewall serves like a gatekeeper, filtering all incoming and outgoing traffic to block out harmful activities that may affect your website or application. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Services) protection is designed to detect and block attacks from malicious actors who flood our servers with excessive traffic to bypass them. All these systems are put in place to handle and defend our services against threats in real-time, safeguarding our customers’ data and preventing downtime caused by cyber-attacks.
- Regular Security Audits: Harmonweb conducts regular security audits to identify and address vulnerabilities in our systems. Think of these audits as regular health check-ups for our servers and networks. By continuously evaluating and improving our security posture, we can catch and fix potential issues before they become problems, reducing the risk of downtime caused by security breaches.
- RAID10 for Disk Redundancy: For disk redundancy, we use RAID10, a configuration that combines mirroring and striping to provide high performance and data protection. RAID10 works by storing copies of data across multiple disks (mirroring) and spreading the data out in such a way (striping) that it can be read and written to quickly. This setup ensures that even if one or more disks fail, our systems can continue operating without data loss or downtime, as the data is still accessible from the remaining disks.
- Proactive Management of Abusive Websites: To maintain the integrity of our servers and protect our customers, Harmonweb actively manages and takes down abusive websites that pose threats. Abusive websites can include those involved in malicious activities such as spamming, phishing, or hosting illegal content. These sites can degrade server performance and compromise security, potentially leading to downtime. To effectively handle this, we created a dedicated abuse department. This team specialises in identifying and terminating such websites swiftly. They continuously monitor our network for suspicious activities and take decisive action to remove threats before they impact our broader user base.
At HarmonWeb, we are committed to ensuring that our clients get a reliable, uninterrupted service. With our comprehensive approach, we have put measures in place to prevent downtime, securing our client’s trust to keep their websites running all the time.
