Downtime is bad, right? It’s one of the key reasons for switching hosts. The lack of downtime, perceived or actual, can be a key selling point for new customers.

For quite some time Web hosts have been active in promoting their uptime, often offering prominent guarantees of 99.x% uptime along with their services.

Some hosting companies are going even further to avoid downtime by offering a new kind of account, often referred to as either “Redundant” or “Failover” accounts. Their solution to maximizing uptime is to keep a backup ready if the main server  goes down, therefore eliminating one of the biggest points of failure.

Sounds good so far. However, the term “redundant” has come to mean many different things in the hosting world so it’s worth understanding what you’re getting before you spend any money. First though, a quick explanation of why redundant solutions are so popular.

Why Redundant Solutions Are Worth Thinking About

Your site, if on a dedicated machine, a VPS or a shared hosting account, resides on a single physical machine. Should something happen to that computer, like a hard drive error or a power supply issue, your site goes down. It doesn’t recover until it is moved elsewhere or the computer is repaired.

Though an error or an outage are fairly rare incidents, they do happen. The risk is high: they can lead to catastrophic data loss and extended down time. Most hosts (not all) have backups to mitigate data loss; the downtime can not be easily guarded against.

Redundant hosting tries to change that by having a backup computer ready to take over within minutes or seconds of an outage. However, not all redundant accounts are created equal…

Differing Definitions

For reference here are three Web hosts that claim to offer redundant or failover hosting packages:

1. Draknet: Draknet offers a failover solution that keeps a duplicate of the site in a separate datacenter. If something happens to their main datacenter, they simply update the DNS to point to the other. This is rather expensive, $60 for a failover account you have to update yourself and $90 for one that updates weekly, but it is the most “foolproof” approach.
2. Site5: Site5 has been widely touting its redundant package but it more closely mirrors a “cloud” or “grid” hosting package. There is no backup of the site on a different machine, but rather, all sites are placed in virtual machines that can be moved to a different physical machine on the fly. This service is much cheaper, starting at $25 per month and also enables “bursting” to survive traffic spikes.
3. Hosting Zoom: Hosting Zoom‘s solution more closely mirrors grid hosting where several servers share the load of the site, each taking different functions of the server (email, Web, etc.) but the different machines have backups of each other’s elements so, in the event of failure, any one of them can take over all of the roles. This hosting plan is the cheapest, starting at about $8 per month.

Of the above sample plans, only one, Draknet’s, actually offers a high level of redundancy. While the other two may mitigate well against hardware failure on a single system, a problem with the datacenter or a networking issue within it can still take the site down. By having a backup of the site in a geographically diverse location (what they refer to as “Poor Man’s Redundant Solution”) only a failure in the datacenter and in the failover application could result in significant downtime.

The other two, while potentially great plans, more closely mirror grid and cloud hosting options offered by many hosts. As such, they may not offer a great deal of benefit over hosting plans that you are already familiar with.

Redundant vs. Grid & Cloud

One of the big problems with redundant hosting is that, in many cases, it is, well, redundant.

Cloud hosting and grid hosting solutions provide many of the same benefits of some of the more common failover accounts but at a fraction of the price.

With grid hosting, for example, your site doesn’t exist on one physical machine but as a virtual machine on a group of physical ones. If one physical machine encounters an error, the performance of the grid is not seriously impacted. With cloud hosting, there are hundreds of physical machines so a single failure has almost no impact.

Cloud hosting and grid hosting solutions are still vulnerable to outages at the datacenter level, but so are many of the “redundant” hosting plans. Only plans that store the site at two separate physical locations, such as Draknet’s, protect against both. As such, while Site5 and Hosting Zoom’s plans are neat, they don’t offer any drastic improvements in reliability over grid and cloud plans you can find on other companies and may or may not offer some of the benefits, such as burstable accounts that can handle additional server load during peak times.

Bottom Line

If you’re considering a redundant hosting account, you may want to think twice. The simple truth is that, while hardware failures do happen, they are, for the most part, very rare. I have been hosting Web sites for over ten years and have only had one downtime due to hardware failure. Most downtimes have been due to routing or other datacenter issues and some to my own mistakes. Most redundant hosting won’t guard against that.

Unless a redundant hosting plan offers the ability to backup the site in a different physical location, there is little benefit to having a redundant account versus a grid or cloud hosting one. That being said, depending on pricing, a redundant account may be a great way to get grid or cloud benefits at a lower price.

The problem with having your site at two geographical locations is that, quite simply, it is expensive. You’re essentially paying for two hosting accounts and the failover mechanism. For most, the benefit of guarding against unlikely downtime isn’t worth the additional price. These types of plans are only for specific situations that demand ultra-high uptime, not average Web hosting.

So, if you don’t have a specific reason for needing a redundant host, don’t use one. Any capable Web host should be more than reliable enough for your needs.

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