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Do you have any redundancy in your infrastructure? |
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We have tried as much as we can to provide backup for our infrastucture including purchasing profesional DNS & Mail backup from another company in case we have a total failure of some sort (god forbid!). There are a number of things that are outside of our control such as network problems that can exist anywhere between the user and server, it is worth doing a traceroute to the server to see where the problem is. Some things can be said though...
| Web, Helix & FTP | Unfortunately, due to the nature of these services they will be directly affected by an outage and won't be avaliable until any outage is over. This is the same for 99% of websites, if the server dissapears, so do the sites. |
| Mail | For any sites where we serve the DNS we will automatically set up 'MX Relay' on any hosts that receive mail. This means that a sending mail server will try to deliver mail to the main server (usually ours) first but if that fails (even if the failure is at the senders end) mail will be sent to the backup mail relay. The backup server is hosted on a differant ISP and is set up to retry delivery of the mail to the main server at various time intervals. While no incoming mail will be lost during an outage you may not be able to connect to read it until the outage clears. |
| DNS | Some people say that DNS will be the failing of the internet however if there is one thing DNS does well it is redundancy!! Any DNS served from us is also sent to three other servers around the world which give a huge amount of backup should the our DNS be down. As well as speeding up DNS lookups for everyone it allows sending mail servers to know about the mail backup when everything else is down. |
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