CRM Hosting
Our CRM hosting infrastructure has been developed to provide maximum levels of availability and scalability. The system has the following features:
- No single point of failure. This means that if any single piece of hardware in the cluster fails, the system will still be available.
- Scalability and performance. The system utilizes a load-balanced architecture that allows it to scale as additional load is required. This also ensures that if a single web server machine fails, other machines will take over.
- External monitoring. The system is monitored by a 3rd party services that provides SMS and email notification services within minutes of any down time.
- Offsite backup. The system is automatically backed up offset every 24 hours.
Refer to the figure below for details of the hosting architecture.
Load Balancing
The system utilizes load balancing for all http-based traffic. This includes all web applications that are accessed over port 80. This allows scaling of the system as additional load is required. Note that the load balancers are set up in an active / passive fail over to ensure high availability.
The system works as follows:
- All http requests are routed to the virtual IP address of the load balancer
- The requests are modified and re-directed to a server in the web server farm
- The web server responds directly to the client machine
Backup
The backup processes are critical to any application server cluster. A server is located in an alternate data centre to the primary cluster and is designed to do the following:
- Provide a live backup node for all mysql data in the case of a catastrophe.
- Provide 7 days worth of backups for all database data
- Provide a backup node for the application data on the cluster
The backup server is set up for replication to the primary database server and always contains the latest database data as a result. In addition, the following occurs every 24 hours:
- An rsync is performed between the primary NAS and the backup server that backs up the application files to the backup server
- The backup server does a complete database dump to local hard drive of it’s local database contents
- An email is sent to the system admin notifying of success or failure
Service Level Agreement
The hosting infrastructure includes a 99.9% up time guarantee. In the event that this isn’t met for any particular month, the provider will provide a refund on request of the percentage of downtime of the period.