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Redundancy

June 28th, 2007 by Kenric

One day a couple friends came over to my house into my office.  On my desk I had two staplers sitting side by side.  One friend points to the second stapler and says to the other friend, “You know what that is?” the other friend answers, “A stapler?” to which he replied ”No, it’s redundancy.”  NERD.  You can always tell when someone is in the IT field.

Back in the days when I was working for a CLEC putting fiber into the ground we always had to make sure that we had redundancy.  We had to run fiber into a building twice (primary & backup).  We not only had to run it twice, but we had to run it along different paths.  One came from the west and the other from the east and they took different streets.  After all, if you run two fibers next to each other so that a single backhoe can cut both fibers in one swoop, what’s the point?

As some of you may have noticed, this blog was down for a good part of the day yesterday.  Apparently, my host 1&1 had some issues with the server that this blog and many of my other domains are hosted on.  Now, this blog is not what I’d call a critical online site for me.  However, I could not feel but helpless when my site was down.  I received only half the traffic that I normally get.  Since this blog makes only a few bucks a day, it wasn’t a big deal.  But what if this blog brought in $300/day?

Redundancy is one of those things that you never think of.  You can never get anyone to pony up the money for it.  In fact, when I worked for a data center, additional hosting for redundancy was one of the toughest sells.  However, after 9/11, the importance of redundancy became critical as people realized that catastrophic events can happen anytime and anywhere.

I should have known better to get some redundant hosting.  In fact, I have thought about it but my sites do not need 99.9% uptime so I never followed through.  But what if my sites were down for 24 hours or more?  That would suck.  What if the data center that my sites are on get blown up and the servers were literally gone?  That would really suck.  Those of you with blogs or sites that actually make decent money should definitely look into getting a redundant host. 

Being a nerd, I’m programmed to think with redundancy and contingency plans.  I’m sure alot of my friends don’t know this, but when I plan stuff, I always have a back-up plan.  I never mention the back-up plan, it’s just there, never to be used, hopefully.  For example, I’ll book one hotel but have another nearby on hold or at least confirmed that it has vacancy… just in case the first hotel screws up.  On vacation, I’ll have a main plan, and a backup one in case it rains.

NERD

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