We’re pleased to announce that the upgrades are now complete and service for customers is even better than it was before the upgrades!

This means that the drive must be replaced or data loss is highly likely. It’s our first line of defense. We also use RAID-10 for performance reasons.

The simple fact is that hard drives fail and is not a matter of if but when! Here is an article by PC World on a study that was done on hard drives by Carnegie Mellon University & Google.

The good news is…

Thanks to the experience of our management team and the excellent team that we have at GreenGeeks, the pooled knowledge has allowed us to combine work experience to ensure that customers data is safe and downtime is reduced to an absolute minimum during a failure. We are all about proper procedures & policy. We have replacement hard drives (including other hardware like RAM, CPU’s, Server Chassis, etc) on standby in the event of a failure, we’re able to quickly replace the affected hardware.

In the event that there is a file system / hard drive failure, there are likely two scenarios that would occur:

1. Bad Drive (best case scenario) – We simply replace the drive and the hardware RAID card will re-build the new drive with the lost information from the data on the other drives and in a few hours the RAID-array will be repaired all while your sites are still on line, with no data loss. Total downtime may be less than 1 hour.
2. File System Corruption (worst case scenario) – If a RAID card fails, this can result in a failed a corrupted file system and a full system restore from backups will need to take place. Restoration time can take a few hours, however we have servers standing by and we never use the same hardware components again.

When there is file system corruption, we attempt to fix it within a reasonable restoration time, if this is not met we proceed to restoring the service from backups.

About our backups!

We back up all of our servers, every night and retain the data for 24 hours in the event of a total failure requiring restoration from backups. Our disaster recovery effort! We are also in the process of making our backups redundant as well.

Bottom line is that it’s not a matter of if, but when and being proactive/prepared for the worst is what is going to ensure that data is not lost like it is with other hosting companies (won’t name names!). Rest assured, we take our business very seriously and that’s what we’re all about — quality service and no short cuts.

Karl D.
GreenGeeks / Systems Administrator

“The other guys…”

Many web hosting companies check their servers 1, 3, 15 or even as high as 30 minute intervals to ensure their servers are responding. If you stop to think about it, with check intervals as low as a minute, sites could be down and the hosting company would not know for 60 seconds, only then would they be  notified to begin resolving the issue. An entire minute is pretty long these days. I’ve even seen some hosting companies have internal (on-network) monitoring and I don’t have to go into detail why that’s not smart. I’ve seen a lot of questionable methods and that’s why we strongly believe that experience goes a long way.

“10 Second check intervals and not 1 minute.”

At GreenGeeks, we monitor our servers every 10 seconds from multiple locations around the globe to ensure that we’re up and running. We also run health checks, to make sure FTP, HTTPD, MySQL and other critical services are running and functioning properly. If in the event there is a service failure (it does happen), our 24/7/365 NOC is notified and action is taken immediately to isolate and resolve. From what we have seen, in most cases, issues are isolated and resolved within 30-40 seconds, whereas the competition still hasn’t even realized they are having issues.

This is one of the many reasons, why hosting with GreenGeeks is simply a smart choice! It’s also made it very easy on the staff to be able to continue to provide customer support versus having to deal with “downtime complaints”.

Karl