FutureHosting Goes Rebootless

Customers of virtual or managed servers rely on their hosting providers to keep their online presences up and running. In some cases, downtime of just a few hours could mean lost revenue of tens of thousands of dollars. Most companies, especially those engaged in e-commerce, look for hosting companies that offer service level guarantees and at least 99.9 percent uptime.

Whether it is realistic to expect more than 99.9 percent has always been debated, but Future Hosting is one hosting company that continuously works on improving its statistics. Most recently, the company announced that it would adopt the Ksplice Uptrack system, an innovative technology used by customer-oriented hosting firms to improve uptime metrics. The Ksplice tool runs on a Linux server, and enables upgrades and maintenance to take place without having to reboot the system.

Typically, the system administrator has to reboot a system after routine upgrades and several common maintenance tasks. The reboot takes several minutes, and most hosting companies will do such upgrades during off-peak hours. Nonetheless, it does cause some downtime, and a disruption to the operation of web sites that are hosted on the server.

The Ksplice Uptrack tool works for both traditional, as well as virtualized Linux servers. This provides a great benefit to smaller businesses, which often prefer a less-expensive virtualized server over a dedicated option.

Deploying the Ksplice Uptrack tool is not the only innovation Future Hosting uses to maintain uptime. The company has also developed the Future Engineer tool in-house. Future Engineer is a tech support automation system which automates many of the common configuration and repair processes on virtual private servers.

Future Hosting, based in Novi, Michigan, offers both managed and unmanaged virtual private servers from its five international data centers in the US and UK.

Links

• FutureHosting Official Website
• FutureHosting Coupon Codes & Discounts
• FutureHosting Review