Staffordshire Internet Service Provider Internet Central Ltd is
warning businesses to be prepared and ensure that their servers can
cope with any emergency and increase in numbers of people visiting
their websites, as many think their website is invincible. However,
as recent high profile examples show this is not the case and even
the most experienced of businesses can fall foul of not being
prepared.
Just this month saw the website police.uk crash within hours of
being launched due to numbers of people visiting the site and back
in December hackers claimed to have crashed the MasterCard website
in revenge for the firm suspending services to whistle-blowing
website WikiLeaks.
Internet Central's Managing Director Maitland Hyslop says: "Do
you want to face a scenario like the police.uk site because of poor
planning? When setting up their website many businesses don't
think about this situation and take the "it won't happen to me"
stance. Should your business hit the headlines or you are in
the midst of a disaster like the floods in Cumbria suddenly this
becomes an important issue. Many businesses have shared hosting and
the potential with some is exceeding its resources shared with
other users. All is well and fine, until one day you hit the
headlines or even one of your blog posts or articles gets overnight
fame and your site is instantly flooded with traffic.
If you have big plans for your site and are looking forward to
thousands of daily visits - go big. Get a dedicated server or a
virtual server. Otherwise the transition between small site to
popular site will be painful and almost certainly not without some
downtime."
If cost is an issue to businesses they need to think about a
flexible system and ensure that the ISP they use can adapt to their
needs. Maitland Hyslop adds: "Many of our customers are coming to
us for virtualisation. Our virtual hosting platform has been
designed to be truly scalable so that, as our customer's
requirements and demands change we can move to meet those demands
in real-time. Thus, allowing customer websites or applications
capacity to rapidly scale up. Due to the nature of many businesses
they can experience high growth, seasonal peaks in business and
increases in sales with the introduction of new products.
Virtualisation therefore can be deemed to be the perfect solution
for many. Dedicated virtual hosting makes cost-efficient scaling a
practical reality, it also gives unrivalled resiliency as we
replicate customer websites or applications across several physical
machines and physical hardware to ensure that if there is any
failure, traffic is redirected automatically and in real-time to a
secondary physical server.
With customers and visitors to websites getting faster and
faster connections it is more important now than ever that websites
and data servers respond quickly and reliably. Internet Central's
virtual hosting platform is not only utilising the latest hardware
and software to achieve this but it is constantly monitored and
controlled centrally using highly advanced automated systems which
will reallocate virtual servers to make the best use of available
physical resources to ensure an extremely high quality of service
for customers."
For more information about Internet Central, please visit their
website here: www.internet-central.net