Uptime. Good times! Downtime .. not so much.
July 2, 2014The screenshot above displays a segment of a dynamic statistics report relating to a client hosted one of Digital Tsunami’s private clouds.
It shows that there has been NO downtime for over 37 days, and 99.703% uptime over the last year.
Over the last quarter, uptime has been 99.988%
This is the uptime monitoring which we run for all our hosted client sites. It is scheduled to ping the domains for an online file every 120 seconds. We are immediately notified of any outages via an online dashboard (monitored on multiple devices by a Digital Tsunami support team member) and email. It will detect the briefest of outages, many of which are for as little as two seconds.
Read about heartbeat monitoring.
We completely understand the critical importance of maintaining an online presence. Digital Tsunami has been hosting client sites and our own sites, since last century!
No credible web host offers 100% uptime (or at least not without the significant investment of co-location: a domain having multiple redundancies in multiple locations).
Hardware can fail. Comprehensive redundancy ensures that most components are duplicated to mitigate against individual failure having any impact. Should a small component (which is not duplicated) fail, emergency action is taken and replacement occurs usually within minutes.
Infrequently (possibly once every two or three years), hardware must be upgraded. When this is necessary and downtime is absolutely unavoidable, a server may have to be down for a short time, in order to physically insert and reconnect new hardware. This is notified well in advance and conducted at a time which will result in minimal inconvenience to clients and their online customers.
However, in one year, 99.9% uptime reflects a potentially aggregate 87.6 hours of downtime!
We have implemented, and continue to review and research, every possible measure to minimise downtime, from all the physical and electronic security applied to the data centre, to all the hardware, firmware, software and procedural measures on our private clouds, to minimise exposure to risk.
The most recent outage on one of our private clouds occurred when a big Australian telco technician managed to simultaneously crash all the connections to the datacentre AND the failover connections. Despite intense activity by our data centre support techs, this issue took several hours to resolve.
No clients on our private clouds were affected by the recently detected Heartbleed vulnerability.
It was recently announced that 63% of Australian corporations have been the target of a DDoS attack. The last detected DDoS attack on our data centre (13 months ago), received rapid response.
Review the initial incident report on the DDoS attack.
Read more items related to security.
This information places into context the realities of maintaining an online service for Digital Tsunami hosted clients.
We can’t guarantee 100% uptime. But we are unceasing in our dedication to getting as close to it as possible.
Let the good times roll !
From Our Clients
Thanks to you and the Taishan production crew. Andy and the rest of the team were outstanding. Their professionalism was evident the entire time and they seemed to build a nice relationship with the factory employees, which led to a real spirit of cooperation. My sincere thanks for a job extremely well done.
Andrew and his team have supported Foodbank by providing web services for more than a decade.
In fact, they have just undertaken the first complete redevelopment of the original Foodbank website they built for us, and have been maintaining so ably since.
Andrew is creative and passionate and helps us to keep up, constantly looking for new ways to add value and improve our online communications channels.
We are very pleased with the end result. It was good to have you pushing us along for material in order that we met the agreed completion deadline - you certainly are good project managers!
Clients have really appreciated the video .. sales staff are so pleased to have this tool. It is very empowering to show.
In taking the time to understand our business, industry and vision, Digital Tsunami created a site which strongly reflects our leadership position in the international market and our strategic direction.
Digital Tsunami's expertise in visual design, information architecture, innovative communication and evocative business writing, resulted in an extremely effective website which will contribute to our continuing expansion across the globe.