Mission Critical Hosting

Mission critical hosting used to be the domain of companies with very high traffic sites and 5 figure hosting budgets. As business has become ever more dependent to online purchases, so mission critical hosting has become more mainstream. Today, most businesses would lose significant revenue if their website was down for a lengthy period.

For these businesses, a superior level of hosting is required that far surpasses the basic requirements of just disk space or the simple provision of bandwidth. Other factors that need to be taken into consideration include the available power supply, component resilience, as well as the ability of fan/s to disperse the heat generated by a server running 24/7 under very heavy loads.  Furthermore, given the scale of operations; a disciplined approach is required in designing the hardware architectures to keep pace with high-demand websites.

The right approach therefore is to choose a hosting company that offers a scalable solution with a distributed architecture. Most importantly perhaps, is to find one that will support their offering with a comprehensive service level agreement - the very best offer a 100% SLA.

In many cases the best mission critical hosting platform will be VMware. VMware hosting offers industry leading virtualized performance with a strong focus on reliability. However, like traditional hosting providers you must fully explore the credentials of your VMware hosting partner. They should be running the full enterprise license that enables them to use the high availability functions that are so critical. In addition, the server hardware should be an enterprise blade system such as the HP C7000 system or others from IBM or Sun. Storage is hugely important and again should be enterprise quality such as Equallogic or NetApp.

With these factors in place VMware hosting can offer truly resilient hosting for the most mission critical of websites.

For further information on VMware hosting in a mission critical environment please visit http://www.stratogen.net