Werner Schmidt
Enterprise Networking and Security Expert

It's about web presence

As a technical person, it’s easy to get caught in a trap of just looking at features and benefits and thoroughly missing the point. It seems like that has happened with a lot of firms when it comes to network plumbing and infrastructure. Sure, we talk about active/passive, active/active, dual stack, DR sites, virtualizing, load balancing and the list goes on. However, when you get down to it, it’s all about presence. I often like to say you must be present to win. Whether it’s responding to a phone call, Email or web site, presence is essential.

Load balancing is one of those areas. Yes, I realize the new marketing lingo is layer 7 load balancing, application acceleration and application delivery. However, it’s about the basics, is the web site present?

Lack of presence is harmful and catastrophic. What happens when a bank site is down with a 404 error? Do these customers or prospects come back? Do existing customers start to get concerned? Is an opportunity lost or a reputation? Sure, we can build all sorts of technology to raise availability, but what about adding one more layer to display a message when for whatever reason when things are down hard and the availability layers have failed? We call this a “sorry server” message. Basically it’s the ability to detect a total outage and then create a responder that will display a web page indicating the service is down, management is aware, folks are diligently working on the problem and a please call the following number message appears.

Presence is great. Loss of presence or even responsiveness for a web site is now a Google factor that can affect rankings. That means beyond the outage itself, we can now lose precious rankings that affect future traffic!

Forget about all the stats whether it’s transactions per second, sessions per second or bytes transferred. From a high level view, do you have the ability to maintain presence? It’s easier than it sounds. We offer load balancers that include the ability to offer up a sorry page and provide that last informational message when all else fails, thereby preventing the dreaded 404 error.

Maybe it isn’t even a major infrastructure failure, but rather a human error that lead to a content loss. Perhaps even a hack or defacement issue where presence is available, but not the one you want.

That’s my challenge then, make sure to architect for presence. Use an affordable load balancer like we offer in
Coyote Point from us and use it to maintain presence. I bet you’ll discover some high level management support to maintain presence versus a request to just upgrade infrastructure. Consider us too for how to load balance Microsoft Exchange servers or other applications.