No Single Point of Failure
Posted On: 2009-07-06
So that was the weekend ... I certainly hope you guys over in the United States all had a great 4th of July weekend. Here in Australia our big national day is on January 26 so this weekend was nothing special for us ... but even so, it was a very nice weekend to get outdoors and enjoy the sun up here in Queensland.
The weekend certainly didn't get off to such a good start for some mainstream webmasters though. A major data center in the US went offline for many hours due to a fire. That offline period had a serious impact on many mainstream webmasters even though they weren't hosted at that data center. One of the sites that was affected by the fire was a billing processor and it seems that they may not have their site mirrored elsewhere ... at least not immediately.
It's rather surprising that a business like a payment processor did go down so completely because one of the fundamentals of surviving in business is to never have a single point of failure. Never stake your business on one point that, if it fails, may bring your business to its knees. Instead you should be building in multiple options so that if one key part of your business goes down you simply redirect the flow of business to an alternative so that your business can go on functioning.
Unfortunately many of those who were using that particular billing processor had no other processor built into their business so that when the fire took out the billing processor it also took out all those other peoples' ability to accept payments. When there are so many payment processors out there to rely on just one is a terrible oversight and I'm sure that some of those who were affected are now working towards getting another payment processor hooked up as a backup.
Even if you're not in mainstream ... or not taking payments ... you should be seriously looking at working towards having no single point of failure in your business. Sure if you're just starting out, mirroring your sites to a server in another data centre is not going to be something you can afford ... or even need ... but once you begin to make serious money and you're really pulling in plenty of traffic then it's something you really should consider.
Ok ... so now it's time to change
If you've been reading my ramblings over the years you will have seen me have a little rant about CSS versus HTML. I've always been a major fan of HTML over CSS and taken great pleasure in dissing those who have wanted to talk rubbish about the advantages of CSS.
Now that doesn't mean that I've been ignoring CSS ... in fact for quite some time now I've building playing around with CSS and incorporated parts of it into the sites I've been building. But I still haven't seen any real need to make the move from building most of my sites in HTML to being totally focused on CSS. Despite what the CSS pundits have said I've been able to build sites in straight HTML that have been fast loading and have ranked in the top three or four in Google and the other major search engines.
However, I'm now beginning to see signs that the time has definitely come to make cross over to sites built with CSS instead of tables etc. I'm not going to give away any secrets here but if you want to rank well in the search engines then perhaps now is the time to make the move too.
I've been building sites in straight HTML for the last 13 years so making the move has definitely slowed down my site building program as I learn all about positioning without a single table but I'm sure that it's going to be worth it. I'm even going back to some of my mainstream sites that have been around for a while and rebuilding those as well.
Of course I won't be in a rush to rebuild most of my adult sites for changing the coding ... and even the look ... is likely to bring me a lot of grief from the link lists and TGPs. However the hubs and portals that make up my own traffic pumps are definitely going to get a work over and if you want to make a change to CSS they're the sites I would be working on if I were you.
Sadly there's not much in the way of site building on my list of things to do today ... even after building sites for all those years I still get a kick out of doing it. Instead I've got a heap of writing and link building to do as well as a little promo work for one of my clients.
That's all challenging and interesting but I still like building websites and watching the traffic grow.