What happens to your site when the power goes out
Your website lives on a computer in a building somewhere, and that building has a power bill. When the power goes out, what happens next was decided long before the lights went off, by how the building was set up.
A typical data centre, simplified
A typical data centre runs on the grid, with a diesel generator as backup. When the grid fails, the generator starts and the servers keep running on diesel, for as long as there is fuel in the tank.
If the grid stays down long enough and the fuel runs out, the generator stops and the data centre goes down with it. Real data centres often hold days of fuel and have refuelling contracts in place, so this is a simplified scenario, not a prediction about any particular building. It does show the shape of the problem: the backup is a store of fuel, and the clock starts the moment the grid drops.
When a data centre goes down, your site is gone from the internet until it comes back, and if your back office runs there, your staff lose it at the same time. For most small businesses that is the real cost: not the hours offline, but the hours of work that stop.
How the SecureSpace data centre is powered
Our data centre, at our premises in Canning Vale, Perth, runs on a solar plant of over 10 kW and a 42 kWh battery. It is connected to the grid, and the surplus the panels make during the day goes out to the grid. By night the battery carries the load.
It can drop off the grid and keep running at any time. We do not run off the grid today: being connected lets us send out what we do not use.
The battery holds 42 kWh: enough to carry the servers for over 40 hours with no grid and no sun, and the solar plant recharges it during the day, so without the grid the servers can keep running indefinitely. There is no generator: the sun and the battery are the backup. A grid outage in the area does not, by itself, switch the servers off.
Power is one failure; there are others
A blackout is the failure people picture, but a site needs more than electricity. It needs its network link to the outside world, working hardware, and a copy of its data that survives whatever went wrong. A server with power but no connection looks the same to your customers as one that is off. Our building has enterprise-grade fibre, the servers are our own, and they are backed up daily, to three locations.
Daily backups are a plain thing to say, and the same plain questions apply to any host: how often, to where, and can I get a copy? A backup kept next to the server protects you when a disk fails. It is less help when the whole room is the problem, so ask where the copies go.
What to ask your host about power
You do not need to be an engineer to ask these. Short answers are fine. Vague ones are the warning sign.
- What runs the servers when the grid fails, and for how long?
- Is that backup diesel, batteries, solar, or a mix?
- When was the backup power last tested with the real load on it?
- How often is my data backed up, and is a copy kept somewhere other than the server itself?
- Who do I talk to during an outage, and how do I reach them if your own site is down too?
A host who can answer each of these in a sentence or two has thought about it. The answers also tell you what kind of outage would actually take your site down, which is the thing you are really asking.
If you would like to know how a system of yours would be hosted and backed up here, the contact form on this site is the way to reach us. Tell us what the system does and who uses it, and we will come back to you.
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