We all rely on our connection to the outside world more than ever these days! It’s not enough to have the computers on, they need to be connected to the outside world for email, web browsing and instant messaging etc. This is especially true for businesses of course who rely on their connection to trade with their customers. Generally speaking most small businesses rely on a single ADSL line and if that goes down, which they do from time to time, then they are helpless until it comes back on-line which can be anything from a few hours to a few days in some cases.
Why not consider having a second ADSL line put in place, they are not expensive these days and you can get one for about £30 a month, preferably with an alternate provider so that if you have a problem with one line the other will carry on working.
If you POP your mail there will be no problems and if you get your mail via SMTP then with the right routers and rules set up at your Internet service provider hosting your mail you can send and get your emails via both lines. You can also bind the two lines together for faster broadband access too. The big advantage of course is that should one line go off you will still be able to get your mail and browse the Internet.
This will give a large degree of fault tolerance, you can go further than this with load balancing routers that can switch over the lines between them but as a first step this is a very sensible and economic option that will keep you working through an outage that would normally stop you. Of course you will still be going out to the Internet through your local BT exchange, but the chances are that this is not going to be down altogether, it is much more likely that there will be a problem with a single line, or a card in the exchange.
All in all I can’t see why any one would not want to put this type of system in place these days, the low cost makes it a no brainer.
Have a look at our website and contact us if you want more information on this type of solution www.cselimited.co.uk/contact.html and drop us a line, we would be happy to help.
