One of the most important things aside from knowing your disk space, bandwidth and the popularity of your web hosting is the backbone of your provider. It is a good start to find out what makes them thick and reliable by looking into their data center, the backbone of every web hosting provider that determines the effectiveness of uptime consistency.

This is something that you might rarely if not never consider to understand about what’s going on behind the scene of every web hosting, until your website experiences downtime. Your website might have experienced some downtime over some time, if not a planned downtime, but when you call up to the support center of your provider you often get responses like ‘the problems comes from our backbone and there’s nothing we can do but wait for a recovery’

From there you should understand the significance of their backbone (datacentre) that every web hosting replies on. The backbone is where all your servers of your website are being stored physically. It is located in a secure and redundant power supply to provide the perfect environment for servers to run all day long for non-stop.

For that, it is useful to understand how the physical environment of the data center works. Every data center must have a rigorous control system on the physical environment that include a well design architecture that can supply appropriate air conditioning, backup power, fire protection, and more importantly a good team of management.

The well functioning air conditioning is to maintain proper temperature, as all operating machines will emit heat that causes damage to the hardware and shorten their life-span. So the control of temperature and humidity must be managed with scrutiny.

Unlike any other personal office built data center, most do not have backup power to support electricity failure. But a well-fitted data center contains a few backup powers with one or two more uninterrupted power supplies and diesel generator as contingency. Other facilities such as fire protection system play an important role to safe guard the servers.

Other than that, physical security should also be well managed by the data center’s management that is by allowing only selected personnel to access the servers to prevent intellectual theft or cause any other unforeseen problems. Proactive measures should also be exercise by the management to solve any potential issue early on. Now that you know what other factors determine a reliable web hosting, you might as well do some research on the web hosting’s backbone the next time when you’re looking for one.