Improve your Web-Server's reliability and availability

If you are a web-developer or digital agency you will know the frustration of having your customers' websites go down or even just being slow when there is high demand. In many cases your customers rely on the website you have built for them to underpin the sales or communication functions of their business.

If the Web-Server or Web-Server hosting company you are using is unable to improve things for you, you may want to consider moving from a single mono-lithic architecture to a multi-tier architecture. How does this help? Well first, lets look at what each of these terms mean.

Mono-lithic simply means that all of the components required for a Web-Server's function is housed within a single Linux distribution or Windows Server. It lacks capabilities like scalability and redundancy. The separate components are also not able to be easily maintained without impacting the others.

Components would include webserver software (eg. Apache), the Linux distributions or Windows Servers, management tools (eg WordPress) and customer code (eg PHP) as well as Databases and FileStores.

The multi-tier architecture in contrast decouples the components to independently scalable application components can be separately developed, managed, and maintained (often by distinct teams). This also allows for the addition of load balancers and auto-scalers.

How does this help?

Once the separate components have been migrated from the single Web-Server environment to multiple cloud services the reliability and availability of the websites hosted within that environment are significantly improved. Single points of failure have been reduced, scalability has been introduced and each component is being individually managed in terms of backups, performance optimisation and ongoing maintenance.

If you have concerns about your customers' website performance and would like to explore ways to develop a multi-tier architecture we can help.