Back in August 2011, 10th August at 2:36pm to be exact, several areas within central Wellington, including the southern area of the CBD, Mount Victoria, Mount Cook, Newtown, and Oriental Bay suffered power cuts, resulting in homes and businesses being without power for approx. an hour. This also resulted in network outages for communication lines.

This outage came at a time when stronger disaster recovery measures were being planned post the Canterbury and Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.

Expert had already been working in partnership with our local ISP to find the best way to ensure that our hosting environment remains protected in the case of network outages as a result of incidents and /or the occurrence of events which are outside of our control.

Measures undertaken to ensure a network outage does not affect Expert hosted sites include:

- Specific redundant link protection is deployed for the Expert hosting environments

- Move of our hosting location to an off-site location with generator backup, and the ability to switch between fibre, copper, and wireless transmission as required – if one goes down, we still have the other two for communication across the rest of the country and world. The off-site location also has a strong earthquake safety rating, protecting servers and site hosting, should an earthquake strike.

- Additional UPS (uninterruptible power supply) is in place for our main router, and servers.

- Disaster Recovery switching system, should the network go down, moving all sites between Wellington and Auckland, in the case of a complete network failure.

The aim of these measures is to ensure that hosting of sites remains reliable, providing access to MoST, and its tools, while continuing to support our clients' organisations.

If you have any questions on our back up and disaster recovery systems, please do not hesitate to contact the team at Expert on us@expert.co.nz