MIRRORING

Mirroring of a website is the creation of multiple websites that are exact duplicates of an existing website. Only high-traffic sites should consider adopting a mirroring model.

A website can use mirrored sites in many ways:

• To improve the download speed to your customer by providing more than one server in more than one location with the identical information. Therefore, when traffic becomes too heavy for one geographical site (or one server) to handle, your system can hand off the additional traffic to the mirrored site.
• Live standby servers where data contained on the primary servers are seamlessly mirrored on the standby servers. In the event of an unplanned outage, such an infrastructure can keep a website running efficiently, including both hardware and software.
• When a website uses a system that generates dynamic HTML, it can create a mirror of the site with fixed HTML for search engine indexing purposes, along with special scripting that can direct customers automatically to the “real site.”

Since you are creating a duplicate of your site in every way, including the software and the hardware, the costs can be astronomical. To help you to decide whether to implement a mirror site, consider the costs that come with a site being down because of a natural disaster at the servers’ location or a hacker attack.