When any part of an e-commerce site is unavailable, the company might well be losing money. This white paper describes ways to reduce or eliminate downtime in a Commerce Server 2000 environment. Availability is a function of whether a particular service is functioning properly.
All sites have some degree of availability.
Hardware failure, data corruption, and physical site destruction all pose threats to an e-commerce site that must be available close to 100 percent of the time. You can enhance the availability of your site by identifying services that must be available, then identifying the points at which those services can fail. Increasing availability also means reducing the probability of failure. Decisions about how far to go to prevent failures are based on a combination of your company's tolerance for service outages, the available budget, and the expertise of your staff. System availability directly depends on the hardware and software you choose, and the effectiveness of your operating procedures.