The world runs on the internet. To grow as a company, it’s important that your customers have easy access to your website to purchase your product or service. You need a great website, which means you need a great server.
While all servers essentially perform the same functions, not all servers are alike. Why is it important to have a quality server for your company? Well, having a good (or bad) server can have a tremendous impact, including:
- What kind of experience potential customers have with your website
- How protected your company is against attack or loss of information
- How much room your company has to grow
You may be asking yourself: Do I have a good server or a bad server? What makes a good server? A great server should be fast, stable, secure and scalable.
FAST
It can be overwhelming to read a lot of computer science terms, so let’s make this simple.
Let’s talk about speed first, because, in the words of Ricky Bobby, “I wanna go fast.”
It’s important that the server has plenty of random-access memory (RAM) – you’ll need at least four gigabytes of RAM on your server. Anything less and you’re going to risk being too slow. Think of RAM like the engine of your car. There’s a reason why NASCAR drivers have big-time engines. You’re not going to win Daytona driving a Model T.
Also contributing to speed are memory and storage. These can allow your server to multi-task and perform functions more efficiently. A “good” amount would be between 500 gigabytes to one terabyte for storage and it’s important to have flexibility to adjust memory to fit the needs of your site.
STABLE
DeanHouston has a partnership to run our servers through Amazon Web Services (AWS) – maybe you’ve heard of them? Many major companies use AWS, such as Netflix, Samsung, Facebook and ESPN.
The way it’s set up ensures our servers are stable and reliable. You can have great speed to your website, but if half the time there is an error or it doesn’t load, you’re doomed.
We make sure things are stable by having two duplicate servers – housed in different parts of the country. If one happens to go down, users are sent to the other server for the time being while the down server is being fixed. The general public is none the wiser.
This is done through a load balancer.
Picture pulling in to park at a large-scale event – like a football game. The grounds have two different parking lots – Lot A and Lot B (these are the two servers in this metaphor). In order to ensure the parking lot isn’t too much of a mess, the flagger (load balancer) can send one car (a website visitor) to Lot A and the next to Lot B.
Now, if something goes wrong in Lot A, the flagger can still keep the traffic moving by simply sending all the potential cars into Lot B.
That’s part of the reason why websites DeanHouston+ manage are always stable and ready for the viewing public.
Coming soon… Part 2: How security and scalability help make a good server.