Today’s websites are expected to be available 100% of the time. The Internet has connected a global marketplace of consumers and businesses where any amount of unplanned downtime can be disastrous for retail orders and/or reputation. If you desire to have a highly available website, study this list of the three reasons websites fail:
1. Management, developers and administrators aren’t invested in disciplined change management.
If you want high availability, you must manage your changes. A stack of shiny hardware alone does not provide uptime. So the last time you suffered a web site outage and during the problem your developers and admins were all claiming innocence that nothing changed, well, odds are they are lying. After you discover the cause, you get the same song and dance, “Oh, well that shouldn’t have caused a problem.”
Anyone with experience in IT will intuitively understand this truth. Luckily, we also have some data to back this up. Donna Scott, VP & Research Director, Gartner, notes that, “80 percent of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues, including poor change management practices, while the remainder is caused by technology failures and disasters.” I think our unwillingness to address this truth directly is because we’d rather blame some “system” or “hardware” for root cause rather than the people who should be held accountable for uptime. Throwing money at software and hardware will not solve people problems. Buying the super redundant n+4 failover hot-cold-warm standby solution won’t fix the problem that “Jimmy type-twice-think-once” has root (Administrator) access to the production environment.
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Read any web designer’s blog and one thing will become obvious—HTML5+CSS3 is allegedly the best thing to happen to the Internet since Firefox. It seems like their excitement has spilled over to the entire tech community, but does anyone know why they are so excited about the new languages?
The next time a tech tries to evangelize HTML5 at you, here are three tidbits you can throw back at them:
One, your browser doesn’t support it.
Even the newest browsers on the market have limited and spotty support for HTML5 and CSS3. New HTML5 tags like <header> and <footer> need to be styled for backwards compatibility. Developers need to jump through hoops to code CSS3 differently for each browser that supports it (Firefox requires you to prefix new property names with -moz-, for example, while Safari requires you to use -webkit-). In other words, until new web browsers fully support the new languages, and until those browsers become de facto standards (how many people still use IE6?), HTML5+CSS3 is just a hindrance.
Two, you won’t notice a difference, anyway.
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With a new version of nearly every product always on the horizon, you might be wondering if Exchange 2010 is simply another ploy to squeeze your wallet dry. After all, it’s just e-mail! But for anyone who has lived through Exchange migrations in the past, Exchange 2010 has a few features that might make your next migration a little bit simpler, while also giving your users something to rave about. Just a quick disclaimer, though: Exchange 2010 is still under development. Some features may change between now and when the product is released.
#1: Online Mailbox Moves
As you know, moving data takes time. Users with large mailboxes are usually the ones that are least willing to wait patiently while their mail moves (especially if that mailbox is moving to another location across a WAN connection!) In previous versions of Exchange, users were unable to access their mailbox while it was being moved. Users who were in cached mode and had Outlook open prior to the move were still able to access old mail, but new mail wasn’t available until after the move.
In Exchange 2010, mailboxes can be moved between different Exchange 2010 databases without any interruption in service. While this doesn’t directly help migrations from older versions of Exchange, organizations moving a mailbox to another site can first add an Exchange 2010 server to host the mailbox at the existing site in order to reduce downtime while data travels across slower connections.
#2: Database Availability Groups
One of the biggest complaints that I have heard from companies seeking a highly available Exchange 2007 solution is that doing so required a minimum of 4 servers. This is because no other roles could be installed on the same server as a clustered mailbox server. Doubling the number of servers adds cost, no matter how you slice it.
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We are please to announce that we have been awarded FindMyHost.com Editor’s Choice in the category of Managed Hosting for the month of August. The FindMyHost Editor’s Choice Awards are chosen based on editor and consumer reviews. INetU has previously been Editor’s Choice in the categories of Dedicated Hosting, Managed Hosting, ASP.NET Hosting, and Business Web Hosting. This is the eighth time INetU has been Editor’s Choice, and second consecutive month of being chosen.
Chris Henning, CEO at FindMyHost.com: “Month after month FindMyHost, Inc. continues to receive valuable feedback for INetU, its exceptional services delivered and provided to its customers. Recent nominations provided five stars towards their ‘Managed Services‘ which are delivered to each and every customer. We are honored to have INetU associated with the Editor’s Choice Awards and extremely pleased to award them with the Managed Services Editor’s Choice Award for August, 2009.”
See all of August’s winners.
INetU Managed Hosting, an enterprise managed hosting provider, announced today that it has joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a new participating organization. As a Participating Organization, INetU will work with the Council to evolve the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) and other payment card data protection standards.
The PCI DSS, endorsed by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc., requires merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit customer payment card data to adhere to information security controls and processes that ensure data integrity. More information on the council and the standard can be found at www.pcisecuritystandards.org
As a Participating Organization, INetU will now have access to the latest payment card security standards from the Council, be able to provide feedback on the standards and become part of a growing community that now includes more than 500 organizations. In an era of increasingly sophisticated attacks on systems, adhering to the PCI DSS represents an entity’s best protection against data criminals. By joining as a Participating Organization, INetU is adding its voice to the process.
Read the full news article here: INetU Managed Hosting joins PCI Security Standards Council as newest Participating Organization
