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Up to 66% of UK/US dedicated server solutions risk data loss

June 9th, 2008

Looking across a selection of the top ranking UK dedicated hosting companies as well as a large selection of providers in the USA, on a rough average between 25%-66% of their main advertised packages do not have redundant harddrives. We are unable to get figures on managed hosting servers as these are typically not advertised.

Why is this important? Well, drive failures are accountable for the majority of server hardware failures and data loss. Research carried out by Google on their massive hosting platforms and by Carnegie Mellon University in the US on a sample of 100k drives, showed that accross a mix of makes, models and operating conditions that between 2% and 13% of drives fail within the first year. While data can be recovered it’s a timely and expensive process, not to mention the interuption to business.

This risk can be easily avoided simply by making sure that whether you are making a buying decision for managed hosting or dedicated hosting that your data is stored on redundant ‘RAID 1′ or higher specification disk systems.

Interestingly, Googles research accross its whole platform showed that there is a much higher chance of failure for drives which under ‘high’ use within the first 3 months with just over 10% of drives failing in that period.

How can one hedge against this risk? Our CTO offered us a few key pointers on how to help remove the risk of data loss.

- When you’re looking at hosting of any kind enqure into what redundancy is built in, if in doubt get them to really explain how it’s set up.

- Always make sure that your data is backed up, most hosts provide some level of backups, we provide 100% of your data but this varies from host to host.

- Make sure that your host is monitoring whether disks have failed or not, it’s all well and good having redundant disks but if you don’t know the 1st one has failed then you’re unknowingly exposed!

Entry Filed under: Managed Hosting