Anigel blogs

Today I have been reminded about the importance of having no single point of failure in your systems.

With news that one hosting company providing both dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers (VPS) has now been offline for 5 days, you need to consider what would happen to your systems if you were solely reliant on a company that also had such an outage.

HostV are not the only people to suffer from outages with several major UK datacentres going offline for shorter periods at some time of another over the past 10 years, it is only prudent to ensure you do not rely on any single company or site for all your hosting.

Commonly called disaster recovery, you plan and prepare for the worst. Ensuring that if it happens, it is no longer a disaster but a just an inconvenience to implement your prepared plan.

To take a worst case scenario, if terrorists blew up a datacentre with the complete irrecoverable loss of all hardware and data on site, could you keep going?

Most importantly take offsite backups and test them. Offsite backups can at least enable you to restore your data to a new server if all else fails. Just make sure that you have regularly tested that your backups are usable and that they contain all the data that you think they do. There is nothing worse than finding out your backups were corrupted or did not contain some vital bit of data at a time you need to use them due to a failure.

Ensure that you have a backup or disaster recovery server in place and online at a different facility preferably in a different country so no single fibre or backbone outage can affect both. This server does not need to be as powerful or as highly redundant as your main servers, it just needs to be able to carry on critical functions during an outage of your main live systems.

Keep the disaster recovery server synchronised with your main live server, you can use systems like rsync and database replication to ensure file and databases are maintained in sync and ready to go at a moments notice.

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The Apache Software Foundation has announced that this is the final release of the 1.3 branch and only critical security fixes will be available from now on.

Apache 1.3 was first released in June 1998 back before Microsoft Windows 98 came out. The Apache 2 branch has now been out for 10 years and had many benefits over 1.3 on release.

Even with the benefits and stability offered by the Apache 2 branch, 1.3 has still been heavily used over the past 10 years despite the case for preferring it to version 2 getting progressively weaker. With this announcement we may see more people finally take the step of transferring to the Apache 2 branch, a change that is normally pain free and see some volunteer time freed up from supporting and maintaining what had essentially become a legacy version of the web server, giving them more time to spend on newer and more interesting stuff.

With more and more organisations turning an eye to the blogosphere and social media in an effort to increase market share and brand awareness, it is very easy to drop the ball on security of your internet presence.

Whilst it is easy to focus budgets on new marketing opportunities and exciting new projects, existing web sites need to be maintained. There are two main aspects to this maintenance.

• Regular content updates – Nothing will keep a site as fresh and trending as new content, that however is something for another post
• Regular security audits and updates – which we discuss here

Your search engine optimisation activities rotate around trying to improve your position in search results and any good SEO campaign will reap benefits for you in this area. However you can find that within a relatively short period, your carefully constructed internet site can become exploited by less conscientious groups in an effort to improve their own ratings at your cost.

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