It is not impossible to prevent web site outages, however, your budget may not allow you to take every necessary step. With this process you can do the most to reduce or eliminate outages from your end-user prospective.
- Plan — Before making any changes to the environment plan how you will assess, implement, and test your findings. Do changes incrementally with clear roll-back plans before starting.
- Peer — Spread out risk by using several paths to your visitor, either multiple connections to the Internet or multiple servers. Never have a single point of failure.
- Prepare — Know what kind of failures are possible and prepare for those events before they happen. Most never will, but your preparation around disaster recovery and redundancy will protect you from unforeseen events.
- Prevention — Build in hardware migration, upgrades, and other service events months in advance. Follow this method for each event, remember the hardware eventually wears out and software needs upgraded.
When your website or back end data system goes out it hurts more than your customers ability to connect. It costs revenue, trust, and your overall stability. Most companies won't put in this time before because they just don't understand the true costs of failure.
In the New Year: the Plan, Peer, Prepare, and Prevention method is your insurance against monetary losses of a web site outage. It costs much less than the real loss you'll be hit with when your environment faces a challenge.
© 2008 JWH Consolidated Inc, All rights reserved.
Justin Hitt and Hitt Publishing Direct helps you avoid costly web site outages with proven solutions that fit your budget. Visit for details at https://www.jwhco.com/