High Availability Cloud – What Is This And Why Is It Important?

High Availability Cloud Servers
  • June 30, 2022
  • Cloud Server Hosting

Why Is It Important To Use High Availability Cloud Servers?

Let's start with the fact that Cloud is all about reliability and scalability. It is not about billing. It is not even about flexibility, which is a very important feature when it comes to It infrastructure management. The ability to scale up and down the technology infrastructure capacity without any interruptions of the application services is crucial in today's and tomorrow's digital economy.

To have an uninterruptible delivery of the application services, however, means that there must be a genuine Cloud infrastructure. "Genuine Cloud" does not mean Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or any other major cloud platform. In fact, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models adopted by major clouds are so perplexed, that unless the organizations have a knowledgeable IT management team, the cloud infrastructure services they use with any Big Tech Clouds result both in application downtime and huge service bills.

Genuine Cloud means a Cloud infrastructure framework that ensures a continuity of the virtualized infrastructure environments used to host applications. Once there is such continuity in place, then organizations can focus on providing high uptime of the application service delivery. One of the most commonly used methods to increase the Cloud infrastructure service availability is called High Availability.

How Does High Availability Cloud Work?

A Cloud environment (Cloud Server) can be considered highly available if there is a proven method that in case of downtime, it will resume operations with the lowest possible delay. Enterprise virtualization technologies like Proxmox VE and VMware ESXi offer high availability functionality. Proxmox VE for example allows the deployment of a High Availability Cluster (Proxmox VE HA Cluster). Such a cluster makes it possible to define highly available virtual machines, e.g. "High Availability Cloud Servers". The high availability function allows the Cloud-based virtual machine (Cloud VM) to automatically restart on another physical node (part of Proxmox VE Cluster) in case of failure of its own physical host.

There is similar functionality in the VMware ESXi-based cluster infrastructure technology. When a Cloud-based virtual server crashes due to failure of the underlying physical server or failure of its own operating system, the High Availability service automatically restarts the Cloud server on a different physical host, part of the High Availability cluster. After the restart, if properly configured all the applications resume work automatically.

The high availability (HA) function saves significant human effort and reduces any likely application downtime. As HA is a native cloud service, it usually is expensive when bought from any of the major clouds. Why? Because companies like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud charge for DNS zones, DNS queries, data transfer from different geolocations, and many other services, which are naturally non-paid. For this reason, it is worth buying High Availability Cloud Servers from any of the smaller or medium-sized Cloud IaaS providers. Then HA Cloud service really increases the operational continuity of the software applications, while at the same time keeps the organizations' monthly recurring cost for IT infrastructure under control.

SW's HA Cloud Servers

ServerWhere's main data centers for delivery of High Availability Cloud Server hosting services are in New York, U.S., London, UK, Frankfurt, Germany, and Singapore (Asia Cloud Servers). SW also delivers High Availability Cloud Servers from data centers in Chicago and Sofia, Bulgaria. The IaaS provider also provisions Public and Private Clouds with or without HA from various European locations (Europe Cloud Servers) - Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Athens, Greece; Bratislava, Slovakia; Madrid, Spain; Prague, Czech Republic; San Jose, California; Sydney, Australia, and Warsaw, Poland.

All Cloud Servers provisioned by ServerWhere feature a 1 Gbps internet connection with a certain amount of data transfer. Users can choose Windows OS, Windows Server, or any Linux OS distribution. SW does not charge for infrastructure technical support, it is included in the cloud plans.

The High Availability Cloud Servers delivered from our New York, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore data centers feature premium DDoS protection and 100% infrastructure service uptime. In case of a downtime of the underlying physical infrastructure SW offers a refund in form of service credits, equivalent of up to the full monthly service fee, paid for the Cloud IaaS.