There are so many different things that can go wrong on the Internet that it is really amazing that it works as well as it does.  Most hosting companies actually depend on the fact that moving your web site from one hosting company to another is too much trouble.  So, if they can get you to sign up for hosting, they can depend on you staying with them regardless of the problems you may have.  However, there are some problems you may have that you will never be aware of unless someone points them out to.

Internet Failure

You sign up with a web hosting provider is so that other people can access your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without fail.  There is nothing more frustrating than finding out that for whatever reason, no one has been able to see your web pages.  Even more frustrating is not being able to get or send your mail.

Getting There and Back Again

In a lot of ways, the Internet works a lot like an automated version of the old phone network.  In the old days, you'd pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect you to Joe, down the street.  In a small town, this was enough information and the operator connected you to that person.  Now, we just have a number for each phone we want to call and we call that person directly.

How is this like the Internet?  Every computer on the Internet is recognized by a number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address, not the name you type into the address bar.  When you type in www.dmbhosting.com, the computer does a lookup in an Internet "phone book" to find out what IP address it should use to connect you to that computer.  On the Internet, we call the phone book the Domain Name Server (DNS.)

So, here is the first thing that can go wrong.  If your computer can't find the DNS, it won't be able to get the IP Address and therefore will not connect to the computer that is hosting the web site.  Fortunately, there isn't just one phone book.  Typically, each Internet Service Provider (ISP), the company you use to connect to the Internet, has at least two Domain Name Servers.  Each of these servers gets its information from a master DNS who may get it from yet another DNS.  When the association between the web address and the IP address changes, it can take several days for all of the DNS computers to be updated.

This leads us to the second thing that can go wrong.  If the information isn't right, or has recently changed, the web site won't be reachable.  That's why we give you a temporary address to access your web site.  If you are switching from one hosting company to another, you'll need to be able to access the new site while you are moving the information.   Many hosting companies don't provide any way of moving and testing your site without also moving your domain, and anyone who has moved even one web site can tell you that you're likely to experience a few wrinkles in the move even with a relatively simple site.

The final piece of this "phone system" that can go wrong is the routers.  You see, when you connect to a web site, what really happens is that several computers between yours and the destination figure out the best route for the connecttion -- just as, in the real phone network, you may be routed through a neighboring town when talking to someone just down the street.  For the most part, the Internet has redundancies that guarantee multiple paths between your computer and the destination -- but smaller hosting companies often have only ONE way of getting in.  This is what is typically referred to as the "backbone."  If your host has only one backbone and something in that backbone isn't working, people won't be able to reach your web site.  DMB Hosting has several backbones as well as several peering relationships.  It would be a really bad day on the Internet if they all went down.  If that occured, you probably wouldn't be able to access any other web sites either.

Web Site Access

Another reason you may not be able to access your web site is because the computer that is hosting the site isn't running.  The most likely reason for this is that we needed to reboot the computer.  While we try not to do this too often, every computer requires routine maintenance for the good of everyone using the computer.  This could be something as simple as applying an upgrade or service pack to minimize problems in the future.  If you find that your web page is not being served up, give it a few minutes to reboot before you conclude there's a problem on our end that we don't know about.  The truth is, we monitor all of our servers and tend to spot problems before any of our customers do.

e-Mail Access

Several things can go wrong with the mail server.  The easiest to spot and fix is that the server is not running.  We monitor our mail servers and always know if they are working properly.  However, just because they are working properly does not mean something or someone has not done something to cause them to work inefficiently.

The number-one cause of problems on our mail servers is that someone signs up for hosting service and then sends out a mailing to a couple hundred thousand "subscribers" (see our article regarding SPAM ).  No mail server can send out that volume of e-mail instantly.  The mail server ques the e-mail in the order it is recieved.  This means, all of the SPAM will be sent first.  Any e-mail that you try to send after the spam will eventually get sent after the SPAM has been sent.  This could be a half hour, or several hours later.  As soon as we notice the problem, we kill the offending account and delete the e-mails the server is trying to send from that account so that the other people who are using the e-mail system responsibly can continue to send and recieve e-mail normally.

Sometimes the e-mail software that you are using may be to blame.  Simply rebooting the computer could solve your trouble.  It can't hurt, and it may actually get things working again.

We rely on our e-mail servers for our own business.  You can be sure we will do everything we can to keep them working optimally for all of us.

So What Happens if the e-Mail Server Does Go down?

You would think that if the mail servers did go down, any mail sent to you during that time would never be delivered.  Fortunately, this is not the case.  You see, if an e-mail server cannot send e-mail to another e-mail server, the originating server will keep trying until the e-mail is sent.  Most servers will retry for up to 24 hours.  Once the time limit is exceeded, the mail will returned to the originator.  In this way mail is never lost on the Internet.

SQL Server Access

While many sites can get by with storing data in a Microsoft Access database, some of our customers, such as those operating high-traffic stores, need a more powerful database called SQL.

Our SQL servers are all accessible via standard Internet protocols.  So far, the only problem we could have had was a port attack aimed at the MS-SQL servers.  We already had the patch applied to our server but, in an effort to stop the attack, we temporarily disabled Internet access.

Computer Failure

So far, we've outlined what can go wrong when all of the equipment is working correctly.  What happens if the computers that make all of this happen start falling apart?  Fortunately, that happens about as frequently for us as it does for you.  Here's what can go wrong:

Hard Drive Failure

Hard drives fail.  No one likes it but it happens.  We have extra hard drives of exactly the same type sitting on a shelf ready to be installed in just such a case.  Sometimes this can be a simple matter of copying data.  Other times it requires rebuilding the computer.  Between the extra hard drives, the daily backups and a test restore once a month, we are confident that we can recover from disk failure.  However, this is the one place where it may take more than a few minutes to recover from the failure.

Power Failure

The power goes out here just as it does in your house -- but, our data center has backup power for just such a time.  Power outages aren't the only power problems though.  The power supplies on the computers can fail as well.  Each of our computers have dual power supplies that provide additional protection against power failure.

CPU Failure

Each computer has a clone sitting on the side waiting to take over if one of our computers fails.  In most cases we can just put the hard drive from the computer that isn't running and place it in the new computer and have everything back up and running before you even know there is a problem.

Router Failure

Remember the phone switches above?  The last router on the way to the servers is our router.  It can be replaced, but for the few minutes it will take to replace it, you won't be able to get to any of our servers here.

Security

When you publish a web site to the web server, most of the data is public information that you want the world to see, but some of the data is private. For example, you might need a database on the web server with private client contact information. Further, you don't want anyone else to be able to change the content of your site.

Recently, an associate wrote a program to see how much of a web server's hard drive he can access from the computer his web site is hosted on.  At the time, he had his site hosted by another company and he was shocked to find that he could access the data for any other web site on the same computer.  He could have accessed data in their databases or changed the web page content.  When he tested our computers, he found that he was only able to access the files in his account and not any of the files in our other customer's accounts.  You can place your data on our servers with confidence.  None of our other customers are going to be able to access that data.

This leads to another issue.  You are going to store all this data on a computer in some other location.  How do you know your data is safe?  Our server rooms are only accessible by authorized personnel using key-card access.