As a business owner, one of the most important parts of your job will involve ensuring you have a strong online presence. You will need to make sure your website is safe and secure, delivers on all the tasks it is setup for, reaches as many of your clients (current and potential) as possible, and remains up-and-running for a major part (somewhere in the vicinity of 99%) of its online life.

Quite understandably, this is a task that will need serious consideration and will most definitely involve knowing how your web hosting is handling the care of your website. You will need to monitor the resources that are available to you, the security that has been put in place, the versions of all the software you use and whether or not they have been upgraded as required, and also whether or not they are living up to their uptime guarantee.

This particular task will be a bit easier if you have a single website and have it hosted on one hosting provider. But, it being a not-so-ideal world, there might come a time when you will either need to host one website on two (or more) servers, or multiple websites on just as many servers and still take care of them by yourself (or with the help of freelance talent).

Why One Website on Multiple Servers?

This is a reasonable question to ask, and at first it might seem like there is no need for the arrangement to begin with. Who [in their right minds] would want to host a single website on two or more hosts?

One answer would be an owner of a site that has a number of separate modules. Let’s say you have an ecommerce site that is doing well. You wouldn’t want to risk anything interfering with its performance. Hence, you wouldn’t want the traffic that comes to your blog or chat room to hog the resources that is dedicated to your commercial and online trading activities. You would, therefore, want to keep the traffic and resources separate lest one interfere with the other’s performance.

Then again there are businesses that own more than one website. This is especially true if the business is made up of various groups or is a collection of separate divisions. While they might decide to link the sites to one another, they would ideally have separate sites for each sub-group or division.

So, which is Best – One Server or More?

This is a conclusion you will have to reach on your own, but we will list the ideal conditions for each choice to make it a bit easier for you.

Host it all on one server:

• If your hosting options are limited. Whether it is because you have specific requirements that can only be met by few hosting providers or there are simply no hosting providers to choose from (Not everyone lives in the First World, remember?) then you will have to put it all on one server and hope for the best.
• If you don’t have the manpower to keep an eye on more than one hosting server. Web admins come at a price – and it is usually an expensive one. If you can’t do the site management on your own then put everything on one server and let a single admin monitor it using a central dashboard.
• If you get a good price with a reliable hosting provider. Some hosting providers out there have everything you need under one roof. If you are lucky enough to find such a provider and find their prices reasonable, then go for it.

Host it on multiple servers:

• If you use more than one operating systems. Some sites and application are either designed for, or perform better on, a particular operating system. If your site demands different operating systems, then it would be wise to split servers. If you can afford it, it would also be great to have two separate servers rather than using virtual servers on the same host.
• If your administrators are in different locations. If you have outsourced your websites’ administration, or have administrators that happen to be in separate locations, you would be wise to have the hosting done on servers that are nearer to them.
• If you have data that needs to be stored safely. While it is OK to have a plain-content (informational) website hosted on any “average” server, other sorts of data (personal and financial information, company patented work, trade secrets, etc.) will need to be put on a more secure server. In this case, you can keep the front end of the website on the old server and have your more precious data stored on another one that has all the security bells and whistles protecting it.