Not long after I wrote about the Amazon UK website being effectively down, I received a newsletter from ResellerZoom promoting their new Failover Reseller hosting. The concept is relatively straightforward in that instead of hosting your website from a single server, it’s replicated across a number of networked machines and requests for its pages are balanced such that no single server is ever over-stressed.
This kind of hosting configuration also has the benefit of providing failover i.e. should one server machine die for whatever reason, another server with an up-to-date copy of your website is ready to serve your webpages. No need to wait whilst a backup is restored onto a new hosting account and you don’t have to worry about out-of-date backups.
Clustered servers in the mainstream hosting market aren’t a new thing as FastHosts have been offering it for years, but their service has been poorly rated by every one of their customers I know. On the other hand, I’ve had a ResellerZoom reseller account for a while now and they’ve served me well.
The techonology isn’t infallible, but if you value your website’s uptime then clustered failover hosting may be what you need and $24.95 for their most basic package isn’t a great deal to invest (unless you don’t plan on earning at least that much each month).
For those interested in UK-based hosting, ResellerZoom offer very competitively priced packages from the Redbus Interhouse DC. Unfortunately, the failover service doesn’t appear to be available in the UK yet.
One thing that sets ResellerZoom apart from a lot of cPanel hosts is that they don’t offer unlimited domains on their reseller packages. They used to, but they seemed to cap the service at the time of the AdSense explosion last year when the website generation tools and scraper (why do some people use two ‘p’s in scraper?) seemed to be at the forefront of the Internet marketing world.
For everyone apart from those who churn out hundreds and even thousands of websites with these tools, having such a domain cap is a good thing as it means fairer server resource usage.
Technorati Tags: ResellerZoom, hosting, reseller hosting, failover reseller hosting, clustered servers
Leave a reply