Hosting Resilience Services - Including Disaster Recovery, Load Balancing and Application Firewalls

We encourage clients who run critical or high profile services to consider continuity planning as part of their hosting account with BOCC. We consider a number of options when planning a hosting solution and will only recommend the most resilient, secure and sustainable.

Areas that you may want to consider are: 

Disaster Recovery Facilities

Our secure disaster recovery facility is situated over 150 miles away from our core data centre in Oxford. We provide automatic failover and automated real-time replication of data to our disaster recovery facility. For data security a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel is configured between primary server(s) and DR server(s) in order to replicate data.

In the event of a primary system failure BOCC configures DNS entries so that the DR system can be brought online.

Clustered or Virtualised Hosting

Clustering is the use of multiple servers to form what appears to end users as a single highly available system. We often recommend clustering options for load balancing reasons, as well as for high availability of applications. 

A virtualised hosting environment provides a sustainable environment for multiple applications with large numbers of concurrent users. It also provides a flexible and scaleable environment for the future as organisation needs grow and change.

Application Firewall 

We strongly recommend the installation of an application firewall for clients whose applications are either transactional or hold sensitive data. An application firewall is an enhanced firewall that limits access by applications to the operating system of a server. Conventional firewalls merely control the flow of data to and from the central processing unit (CPU), examining each packet and determining whether or not to forward it toward a particular destination. An application firewall offers additional protection by controlling the execution of files or the handling of data by specific applications.

Load Balancing

We examine the server hosting requirements inline with the actual application and recommend load balancing as appropriate. Load balancing is about dividing the amount of work that a server has to do between two or more servers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster. Load balancing can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both. Typically, load balancing is the main reason why we recommend server clustering or virtualisation.