Managed Email Services for Business
Managed Email Services for Business
Every minute your web site is not available, you can lose sales and damage your reputation!
Unfortunately, web and mail servers are vulnerable to all kinds of disasters. Everything from simple power outages and disk drive failures to floods and earthquakes can quickly bring down your web site or leave you without email (and ruin your day).
All of Safeserve's services operate on failover systems to protect against such outages.
"Failover" is when a user is automatically and transparently transferred from a failed system to a backup system, thereby ensuring uninterrupted operations.
For example, when a web-server fails, with failover the web-site visitors are automatically served by another standby web-server.
Traditionally, failover functionality is performed at the network hardware level with specialised routers. Network data flow is switched between identical server computers (each configured with the same IP address). A serious limitation to this approach is that these server computers must be in the same physical location (within cabling range of the router), potentially making them vulnerable to the same disasters. Of course, the failover router itself also represents a potential single point of failure.
Safeserve employs a software-based solution that uses a new and different approach to achieve the same goal. Instead of working on the network hardware level, it operates on the higher DNS level.
All professional web sites today use domain names – such as http://www.safeserve.com.
DNS servers are used to point each domain name to the numeric network address (IP address) of the corresponding web-server.
Whenever you visit a web site, your computer must first consult with DNS to translate the domain name into an IP address, which is then used to communicate with the web-server.
Safeserve failover functions by continuously testing its servers and dynamically updating DNS, so that, for example, a web-server domain name directs visitors to the IP address of a functional web-server.
Safeserve's computers involved in this are geographically dispersed and are on completely different segments of the Internet, dramatically reducing vulnerability.
With its multiple DNS servers and dispersed installations, Safeserve eliminates any possible single point of failure, and removes the risk of any one disaster bringing down the appropriate service.
