News article posted on: 10-09-2018
5 Advantages Of Separating Your VPS Into Availability Zones
Using a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a cost-effective way for small businesses to maintain power and flexibility, without the technical difficulties and complexities of running their own server. VPS’s can provide a whole host of benefits—from hosting game servers, VOIP services, managing projects, private backups, and running websites.
LOSING DATA OR SERVICES
Previously, if one of the servers hosting your VPS went down, you would lose total access to the service or data it was providing. Even if you had two servers, with the aim of switching should one fail, a total loss from the data centre would render both of them redundant. Because the servers are located in the same region, there would be no way to avoid this. Furthermore, running a backup server located in a different region could cause a number of issues—with the most noticeable being speed and latency.
Until recently, that is.
Here are five advantages of separating your VPS into availability zones. Separated geographically, availability zones can overcome the pitfalls of conventional hosting.
PRIMARY SERVER FAILURE DOES NOT MEAN YOU LOSE EVERYTHING
As we have already alluded to, losing your primary server entails switching to another server, which may be located miles away from the region you or your clients are based in. If the majority of users are populated in the same area, availability zones can be extremely useful. Essentially, you could have server 1 and server 2 both located in the same region, but in different availability zones. Server 1 goes down, but server 2 is still active. Server 2 is located in a different zone, but still in the same general region. Services switch to server 2, with connection speed and latency unaffected.
PERFECT FOR STRICT REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS
Splitting servers into availability zones is a vital approach if you are subject to strict service-level agreements. Data and services can maintain maximum uptime, despite any hardware issues experienced, such as a physical server failure.
SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED LATENCY
Previously, switching to a VPS located in another region would have been the default choice should your primary server fail. Availability zones within the same region negate the impacted latency to your VPS.
GREATER MONITORING OF AVAILABILITY ZONES
Each availability zone is unique, using its own power, cooling, and high-speed connections. By splitting a region, and thus optimising equipment, maintaining peak performance is improved.
PROTECTION FROM SERVER LOSS AT DATA CENTRES
One of the most significant benefits! Losing your primary server as a result of a data centre failure would render your VPS useless. Luckily, each availability zone runs separately within the region. This means, each server would be located on a separate rack within the data centre; therefore, updating or failure of a single rack could take place. Servers can be switched easily, resulting in higher fault tolerance to data centre failures.
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