Redundancy and failover are two words that you won’t hear very often, although in terms of computing, they have been around for several decades. The concept is fairly simple to understand. When one computer or computer part fails, it switches to another computer or computer part. Obviously, in order for this to be effective, this must happen quickly, and if possible, automatically. This way, a disruption is minimal, at best, and this is the difference between a good Web Host and a bad Web Host.

Network Redundancy is very important in this concept. The Internet is a network. Within this network, and even between all of the networks that make up the Internet, there are numerous paths that make it possible for a web browser to display a webpage, to transfer files, and to move data seemingly at the speed of light. The idea is to have as many paths as you can between your webpages and the computers that your visitors use. In this way, if one path fails, others can be used.

While the path may change, the number of requests for documents and files does not typically change at the same time. Therefore, the load on a new path is just as heavy as the load on the old path, in most cases. In fact, it may increase.

Think of it in terms of streets and traffic. If one street is closed, that traffic is diverted to another street. It then joins the traffic that was already using that street, increasing the overall traffic. Just because that one street was closed, it did not change or reduce the traffic on the new street – the new path. Obviously, this can lead to traffic jams. A virus can cause huge traffic headaches along these paths. Many viruses are designed to flood the paths.

A server can fail for many reasons. One of these reasons is the failure of the hard drive. The motherboard may also overheat. There may be a malfunction in the memory or a bug in the operating system. The system may simply be overloaded. Because failures do happen, it is ideal that your Web Host has more than one computer ready to take up the slack of another. This is redundancy. Typically, one computer will mirror everything of another computer, and it can go online in the event that the first computer fails somehow.

Because there will be failures somewhere along the way, you definitely want to know what type of backup your Web Hosting Company has in place. You can also inquire about this before you sign up with a Web Hosting Company. Some companies may simply plan to reboot in the event of a failure, while others actually have a backup system in place, and ready to go. Rebooting the server doesn’t always fix the problem.

Learn as much as you can about redundancy and failover, and you will not only know what questions to ask your Web Host, you will also better be able to understand the answers – and of course then have the ability to choose the most reliable Web Hosting service for your website. We recommend HostGator.