At one time, having a business card was the mark of a professional, trustworthy company. Nowadays, it is unheard of for such a company not to have a website. However, even the world’s best-designed website does no good if it cannot be accessed by prospective customers and business partners. This is why server “up time” is so important.
When choosing a hosting company, you should seek out one that publishes their “up time” statistics. Their servers should be online 99 percent of the time or more. In addition look at typical uplink and downlink bandwidth. Look for any periods of time when the server’s Internet connection appears to have slowed to a crawl. If the company will not furnish this information, look elsewhere. AccessBest prides itself on its near-100 percent up time.
Determine the quality of a company’s Internet link by using ICMP testing, also known as “ping testing”. Using computers located in different geographic locations, send multiple “ping” commands to the server at different times of day. Record the amount of time the test packet takes to return to you. Perform this test numerous times and analyze the percentage of packets that are lost. This will tell you the connection’s latency and link quality. For example, under normal circumstances, servers hosted by AccessBest will provide less than one percent packet loss and latencies of less than 100 milliseconds to most countries.
When disaster strikes and a server goes down, you must be sure that adequate contingency plans are put into action. For example, AccessBest offers the following safeguards in the event of server or network failure:
- Multiple Backup Locations: All hosted clients have their data backed up to numerous remote sites on a daily basis. If a disk failure occurs, the data can be restored quickly and easily. Even natural disasters will not prevent full recovery.
- E-Mail Disaster Recovery: AccessBest keeps its clients in the loop whenever an unfortunate incident occurs. Customers are kept up to date on outage information, estimated time to repair and data restoration progress.
In addition, AccessBest uses state-of-the-art hardware firewalls and security procedures to keep hackers and malware from interfering with your business. No matter what happens, AccessBest is a web host that you can depend on.