I am sure that many companies were asking the same questions last May 2008 when theplanet.com, a large hosting provider,  suffered a raging fire that lead to an extended data center outage affecting 9000 servers (see http://www.centernetworks.com/the-planet-outage-fire-houston).  We knew immediately that sites were down via our uptime monitoring service http://www.webserviceguard.com.

So this leads us to the followings question:  What variables must be considered when choosing a data center?  To answer this, we must look at the single points of failure a hosting provider is susceptible to.

Let’s review what components a data centers relies on to provide service.
1.    Storage / Hard drive
2.    Network adapter
3.    Database
4.    Server
5.    Network line / network usage limit
6.    Power line / power usage limit
7.    Building infrastructure
8.    Third party uptime monitoring service

What disaster recovery plans does your prospective data center provider have in place to overcome
a failure in each of these components?

More importantly, when was the last time the hosting provider tested their disaster recovery plans for each of the above mentioned components, and what was the recovery time for each?

Ideally, they would have a hot failover location ready and waiting to perform a hot failover of any subset of data/service should any component at the primary location fail.

In the real world many times this is cost prohibitive since the cost of a full hot failover location can only be justified for the most critical applications, such as military operations, power grid operations, banking, stock market operations, etc.

However, how close your prospective data center provider comes to a full hot failover location can mean the difference between your website being down for 1 hour and your website being down for 4 to 7 days.  In this day and age most companies rely on their websites for marketing and revenue generation.  It is obviously important to look at components that your provider offers so that your online revenue stream is not affected.

Web Service Guard, the premier website monitoring company, offers uptime and performance monitoring for websites and servers.  Check our Website Monitoring site for more information.

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