Whatever reason you have to rely on a powerful Internet connection, server reliability is something that you must take into account. It refers to the level of dependability you can count on when it comes to your Internet provider delivering the services you need – and if you’re interested in Indiana sports gambling, it’s especially important to make sure that you can access a secure connection any time you want to place a bet.
To the untrained eye, server reliability can be hard to identify. This article will seek to dispel some of the common myths around the idea of server reliability by explaining both what it is – and also why it is so important for those who are placing bets or carrying out other important online transactions.
The Web’s not infallible
It’s hard for many people who have grown up in an era of constant access to the Internet to understand but the reality of the situation is that the Internet is not infallible. There is a significant chance that, over the lifetime of an Internet-accessed product or service, there is likely to be some kind of server breakdown once in a while.
All sorts of problems can affect a server’s reliability. One such problem is the chance of a denial of service, or DoS, attack. This sort of attack refers to the practice of hackers and others to spam a website with so much traffic that it cannot cope, and hence it goes down and refuses to serve your regular customers. Or a non-malicious surge in traffic, perhaps caused by increased demand for your site’s services, could cause a crash. Assuming that a server is infallible, then, is the first big mistake that many who fall foul of the server reliability quest end up making.
Working out reliability
The reality of the situation is that server reliability can chop and change and is not nearly as reliable as the specifications offered by server providers at the outset of any professional relationship might indicate. And this is a significant risk: for those who rely on the web to make an income, for example, the key methods of making e-commerce transactions being down can cause a significant dip in profits. In some cases, such as when the organization is mandated by regulators to provide a particular service at a particular time, server unreliability can cause a risk of fines. And for those who conduct key financial exchanges on the web, such as gamblers who place wagers on the outcome of sporting games or similar, server unreliability can cause intense personal monetary loss.
For that reason, finding a way to work out the chances of server downtime can become significantly valuable. It’s also important to do this before the problem arises rather than in response to a problem occurring. If you wait for the bad news to happen, it’ll be too late to defend against risks of revenue loss or data breaches.
One of the common methods of quantifying server reliability is to do it in terms of time: one such measurement is the Mean Time Between Failures or MTBF. First, you need to subtract the sum of all moments of downtime from the total amount of time elapsed in the period studied, and then divide that by the number of incidents of outages. Once you have this figure, you can use it to do everything from getting accurate maintenance quotes to comparing the market for a more reliable replacement server.
A word of caution
Of course, there’s no surefire way to prevent server downfall. Even if every single possible outcome is currently known, considered and prevented, it’s also the case that as yet unknown risks to server confidence could be unearthed later down the line. And even if a server is defended entirely against the threats currently posed to it, there’s no guarantee that the defense mechanisms in place will work for certain every single time. Yet by getting a handle on it and understanding the numbers, you can reduce the chance of server problems arising.
If you’re in the business of placing wagers regularly via the web, you’ll know just how important it is to make sure that you have access to a server that won’t let you down. As this article has shown, server reliability is extremely important – and for those who are involved in placing high stakes bets online, it’s especially vital to have a server that you know you can rely on.
