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Another Hurricane is on the way, what does that mean to your online business?

Evacuations are already underway in Southern Florida for incoming hurricane Michael and homes and businesses are fortifying their defenses to help protect them from the wrath of this storm. Many online businesses may not realize one of their data centers is in the path of the hurricane and can lose one of their valuable (and possibly primary) hosting locations. For most online organizations, losing a datacenter can wreak havoc with online operations causing email, websites, apps, vpn, phone system and more going belly up. That’s why it’s important to have a plan for disaster prevention/recovery with services that can keep things running smoothly.

Downtime and loss of service from an outage will put a massive dent in your books and can cost many thousands of dollars per minute depending on the size of the business. Avoiding these outages are impossible when it comes to natural disasters, so most business take action to migrate and balance to multiple data centers, avoid a single point of failure. Some of these techniques rely on good ol’ DNS – mainly load balancing and server monitoring/failover based on data center or server health. It’s also a plus that these DNS services are cloud-based and relatively low cost compared to an outage. DNS load balancing provides a simple and effective way of distributing load across multiple servers and data centers, reducing a total outage should one go down. Performance may be degraded, but you’ll still be online!

Adding on DNS failover with endpoint monitoring and now you have an automated platform that can detect server or data center health and automatically failover to a backup. Detecting health involves monitoring a server IP or data center gateway IP and if multiple locations report downtime, the failover is activated. Failover can also be activated on latency, so as a location becomes degraded, you can detect this and activate a failover scenario and removing the degraded host from the load balancing group. A simple, low cost and effective method to add performance and uptime in almost no time. It’s all done with the magic of DNS and best of all it can be deployed quickly and without hardware!