This is great information. Some of the smaller hosting companies like Integrated Solutions and Services have servers that are located in a data center with redundancy features and more than enough bandwidth to prevent bottlenecking. A bottle neck can be describes in laymen’s terms as a sudden decrease in speed due to multiple network packet requests. It is like a freeway. There are certain times during the day that the demand for freeway lanes are more than what is available which results in heavy traffic moving at a slow pace. Redundancy reduces this effect because you have more than one path for communication to the same destination. Redundant servers is another option that provides reliability in case of hardware failure. Two servers share the same storage unit that hold vital data. If one server goes down then the other one takes over. This is accomplished through cluster software. The cluster software has a special network interface which allows the primary server to communicate with the secondary server. If the primary server goes down, the secondary server will not be able to talk to it and takes over as the primary. There is only a momentary loss of communication but the data is not lost.

I have not heard of a data center that does not have onsite generators in case of power disruption. I know the one I worked at had a battery room which allowed more than 30 minutes for the transfer from failed power to diesel generated power. It is important to know if the data center actually tests their backup generators either quarterly or bi-annually.

A DR site is also important for a business to consider. DR is short for Disaster Recovery. With the ability to cluster servers over the WAN, disaster recovery will prevent disruption to business transactions when there is an earthquake, flood, or other natural disasters that can disrupt normal business operations. With this option, you can cluster servers in different cities, states, or countries.

Again, thanks for the input.