LuxSci’s Latest Offerings: High Availability Load Balancers & MySQL
Our new high availability solutions are the latest offerings in LuxSci’s constant mission to better serve our customers. We can now deliver regional high availability load balancers and MySQL, which ensure that our clients’ websites face as little downtime as possible.
Before we discuss the specifics of these LuxSci services, let’s back up a little and explain what high availability is, and why it is important for your organization.
What Is High Availability?
Your company’s website is presumably an integral part of its business. Whether it provides customers with critical information, allows people to make transactions, or provides some other key service, it’s likely a crucial part of your operations.
But what happens if it goes down?
The impacts will vary from company to company, but in many cases it can cost thousands of dollars for each minute of downtime. Whether these costs come from lost business, increased customer complaints, or other effects, an offline website is a serious problem.
Because of this, your organization will want to keep this downtime to an absolute minimum to reduce any negative impacts on the business. This is known as high availability. Put another way, you want your website to be available as much as possible, so your company can continue to run smoothly.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where Murphy’s Law prevails, and what can go wrong often will. This is especially true in the world of tech, which is why high availability systems need to be designed with redundancies in place, so that even when things do break down, the failover process switches to backup hardware and software.
Failover and redundancy measures keep the website up while the problem is diagnosed and fixed, instead of keeping it down for what could be hours or days.
What Causes Systems to Go Down?
The most common causes for systems on the internet to go down include:
- Hardware failure, such as the CPU, memory, power and other critical components.
- Bugs or crashes in operating systems and other software.
- Attacks against the server, such as DDoS attacks.
- Receiving too much traffic for the server to handle.
- Network failure.
- Networking overloads.
- Data center failures, such as power outages or human error.
High Availability and Load Balancing
Load balancers can boost capacity by sharing the workloads between servers. This setup prevents any single server from getting inundated with too many requests for it to handle. They also monitor servers and can automatically redirect traffic to other servers if they detect server failure. This allows your website to remain available and responsive, even in cases of heavy traffic or equipment failure.
Load balancers and servers are often in the same location for practical reasons. However, this creates additional risk, because it makes it more likely for all off them to go down at once if there are issues with networking or at the data center. This means that even with load balancing in place, this setup can easily lead to your website going down.
LuxSci offers a more resilient alternative by allowing clients to place their servers in up to three different data centers within the same general geographic region. Our offering allows the load to be balanced between the servers at these separate locations, making your website far more resistant to going completely offline.
Sure, a single server or even a whole data center may go down occasionally, but it would take an extreme event to bring all three data centers offline at once. This setup helps to ensure a much higher availability rate than if all of the servers are in the same location.
High Availability and MySQL
Many organizations have web applications rather than simple static websites. These require databases to offer their functionality. This means that if the database goes down, the website becomes unusable.
LuxSci reduces the risk of database failure by offering regional high availability MySQL services. This service includes three Enterprise MySQL servers located in separate data centers within the same region. This setup automatically replicates your databases across all of the servers. It also features automated:
- Failover and recovery
- Zero-downtime systems
- Software updates
Together, this high availability MySQL offering makes your database incredibly resistant against going down, all in a hassle-free manner. It’s a HIPAA-compliant replicated Enterprise MySQL solution that survives data center failure.
Our high availability MySQL service is a perfect complement to our regional load balanced web servers. After all, it makes little sense to use a resilient load balancing setup only to be undone by your database going offline.
LuxSci’s High Availability Load Balancers and High Availability MySQL
Your organization’s website needs to be online as much as possible to avoid disruptions to its business operations. Unfortunately, systems fail in the real world, which means that redundancy is crucial if you want to limit any downtime.
Thankfully, LuxSci offers HIPAA-compliant solutions that ensure your website has extremely high availability. These include built-in layer two/three DDoS protection, with optional layer seven DDoS protection and high availability web application firewalls.
LuxSci’s services not only offer high availability and reliability, but HIPAA compliance and a security-focused approach as well. Contact us now for more details on how LuxSci can keep your website secure and reduce downtime.
