You’ve worked hard on your website, and it has to be online for the world to see. The last thing you want is an unforeseen event to take down your WordPress website. With our Synchronized Failover^TM for WordPress you don’t have to worry about this happening to you.

What is it?

Like all major hosting providers Synchronized Hosting uses high quality servers, networks and data centers to store your website. We take server security very seriously and employ many methods to keep your site and data secure.

However no hosting provider can guard against hardware failures, upstream network failures, mother nature, fiber cuts or even the simple power cord getting unplugged. This is where Synchronized Failover^TM comes into play. At least once every 24 hours (usually every 4-6 hours) we make a copy of your website to a server in a different data center, which is in a different city.

In An Outage

If we host your DNS – Your updated DNS records will start to propagate within 15 minutes of the outage being detected.

If you host your DNS – You will be responsible for updating your updated DNS addresses.

What it is NOT

This is NOT considered a high availability solution. Why? Your data is not instantly synchronized every time a change is made. However, in some cases this is a good thing. Imagine making a mistake on your website that causes it to crash. You could restore from a backup, but that takes time. However, with your Synchronized Failover^TM you could manually change your DNS address to the backup site, and be back in business.

How Does It Work?

A common question indeed. The simple answer is that we make a copy of the server and 4-6 hours and have it ready to go in case of failure. However, you and I both know that humans require sleep, and there is more to life than watching a screen all day. So how do we do it?

Creating the Copy

Our infrastructure is powered by GridPane. This robust solution is what allows us to bring you all of these features at a reasonable cost to you.

Every 4-6 hours the GridPane systems will copy any changes over the previous 4-6 hours to the backup server. Every site on every server is copied to its backup server.

Watching for Failures

Having a backup server isn’t any good if you don’t have eyes watching the sites every waking hour. We utilize services from DNS Made Easy to monitor the server. If it detects a failure of a main server, it will automatically update the DNS records for that server. If we host your DNS, then your records will be automatically updated.

When Do You Failover?

The art of failing over to the secondary servers is one that is carefully considered. For example, our systems are automatically updated for the latest security patches, and if needed, a reboot is done at 3 am Eastern (New York) time. These reboots take less than 5 minutes, usually in the 90-120 second range. If we were to fail over on those events, then by the time the DNS propagated out to the world, the server would be back up.

If the provider at our main data center(s) announces a maintenance window that has an elevated risk of causing an outage, we may proactively switch over to the secondary servers as a precaution.

You are, of course, free to set up your own monitoring and failover your servers on your own schedule and your own parameters. However do note that the secondary servers are subject to reboots at anytime.