Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) assure potential customers that your Software as a Service company will live up to your client acquisition team’s promises; however, it is also important to make promises that you can keep, and avoid making promises that are not in anyone’s best interest. Ultimately, you want your new customer to have a long and happy life on your SaaS, and trust is a key component of long-term relationships. Don’t sabotage that with a poor SLA.
Minimizing traffic loss and preventing downtime in a server migration comes down to planning. If you do not take care when you move your website, significant outages can take place. This translates to a number of potential negative consequences for your business including revenue loss, impact on search engine rankings, and damaged customer relationships.
Most failed server migrations can be traced back to poor planning and/or a lack of careful execution of a plan. If planned and executed right, successful migrations can result in no downtime or data loss. At minimum, you can severely reduce the impact of a server transfer by following this easy 5 step approach.
A great way to execute this transfer is to set up DNS at your new host before the “real” DNS cutover. In the new host’s name servers, point the appropriate DNS records related to what you are moving (http, etc.) to your current servers at your current host and set TTL reasonably low (about 10-60 minutes). Most networks on the Internet will recognize DNS changes based on Time to Live, which means if you set this up right, once you make that real cutover traffic will flow to the new servers much quicker. By default, this type of transfer would take anywhere from 12-24 hours to be recognized. That is a lot of time to have customers visiting both sets of servers.
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:
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.
We are excited to have been named a Top-10 Most Reliable Hosting Company by Netcraft for March 2009!
Based in Bath, England, Netcraft is a popular internet monitoring service that measures the response times of fifty leading hosting providers’ websites. These response times indicate a host’s network capacity and level of congestion; a company with a high ranking has higher capacity and lower congestion on its servers. Measurements are taken every 15 minutes from locations around the world. The companies are ranked by fewest failed requests, a result more reliable than ranking by shortest periods of outage.
INetU often ranks well in Netcraft’s Top 10 Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites, and we can only attribute our success to a dedicated team of skilled network administrators, backing our network performance with a 100% uptime SLA.
For more information about Netcraft’s process, please visit their site.
