Standard – Raid 6 disks and daily offsite backup.
As part of the service we keep hot-standby equipment ready in the datacentre to be used in the event of a major failure of any server. This means that if, for example, your server were to suffer a major hardware failure we would be able to swap the disks into a spare chassis and have the server up an running again very rapidly and with minimal disruption.
In addition to that, all our servers are equipped with RAID 6 or higher, which means that in the event of a hard disk failure (the most common component to fail) your server will just keep running, and our technicians will replace the disk. Raid 6 handles 2 concurrent disk failures, so it’s robust.
Backup: data is encrypted daily and backed up off site. So if the primary data centre was to be destroyed, we could rebuild your servers in a new data centre.
Extreme event protection – redundant server, redundant data centre
Our warm spare service adds a redundant server, in a secondary data centre. In the event of failure, we switch DNS to point to the redundant server, users logins will work as normal.
Here’s some scenarios with both options:
Standard
Scenario | Impact on server | Any data loss? |
Up to 2 drives fail | no impact, reboot scheduled with you | no |
Core component failure | < 2 hours downtime | no |
Data centre destroyed (whilst almost unheard off, data centres have been known to be temporarily knocked out by fire/earthquake. Unusual in Reading, where we host) | 2-3 days downtime whilst new server built | Will lose anything uploaded since last daily backup – so worst case up to 24 hours worth of uploads. |
Extreme event protection
Scenario | Impact on service | Any data loss? |
Up to 2 drives fail | no impact, reboot scheduled with you | no |
Core component failure | < 2 hour downtime | no |
Data centre destroyed (whilst almost unheard off, data centres have been known to be temporarily knocked out by fire/earthquake. Unusual in Reading, where we host) | < 4 hours downtime | Anything since last sync, worst case up to 1 hour of data. |
