WAN Optimization Site Mirroring
Site Mirroring can be used for many reasons or combinations of reasons. Site mirroring can be used to backup a server or group of servers. Site mirroring can also be used to load balance information between sites and improve download speeds by sharing the load between two or more mirrored serves. Site mirroring can be used to increase site ranking in a search engine and to preserve historic content from being removed from the Internet. Site mirroring is often used prevent censorship by using site mirrors all over the world preventing the government from being able to remove content from all of the mirrored sites. Site mirroring can be as simple as making a copy of a site and creating a new link or as complicated as creating an entirely new group of servers in a geographically separate location.
Backup Site Mirroring
Many large companies and government agencies have two or more geographically separate sites that are mirrored, running independently of each other in case of a disaster such as an earth quake, fire, flood, tsunami, hurricane, typhoon, volcano or act of war. The mirrored site may be in a different city, state or even across the country. When one of the sites becomes unavailable, the mirrored site takes over allowing the company or government agency to continue functioning.
Load Balancing Mirrored Sites
Some large corporations and government agencies use advanced routers to do load balancing. This allows them to divide the load between two or more mirrored sites to ensure faster downloads and response times. Load balancing routers allow for a seamless failover in the event of an outage. Smaller companies create links to mirrored sites giving users the option to download files from alternate mirrored websites. This helps to divide the load between two or more mirrored servers without the need to invest in additional load balancing equipment.
Site Mirroring for Faster Downloads
Mirroring can be used to allow faster downloads by providing mirrored sites on different continents. In this case a company may have mirrors in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia. By selecting the mirrored site for the continent you live in the download will be much faster because there is a shorter distance for the information to travel.
Mirroring Effects Site Ranking
Site mirroring can be used to increase a site’s ranking in a search engine. By placing hyperlinks from each mirrored site to all of the other mirrored sites you can create a link farm. This process of spamming the index of the search engine is known as spamdexing or spamexing. This process is considered unethical and can get your entire domain removed from the search engine indexes.
Preserving Historic Content through Site Mirroring
Site mirroring is used in many cases to preserve historic content. In cases where financial constraints or bandwidth restraints prevent the web administrator from keeping the contents available, a mirror of the site can be created on another server keeping the content available.
Site Mirroring Protecting Freedom of Information
Site mirroring is used to protect our freedom of the press. Multiple websites containing a news story might be used to keep content available that the government doesn’t want the public to see. By mirroring the contents the government can’t suppress the information by cancellation of the Internet service provider or direct name service. Wikileaks, for example, coordinates with volunteers around the world that mirror their content making it impossible for the government to fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet.
Summary of Site Mirroring
Mirroring is an important part of preventing down time for system critical applications. Advanced routing equipment can seamlessly fail over between remote sites providing redundancy, faster downloads and faster response times. Mirroring websites by copying the contents of a web sites and providing a new link can also help to share the load of large downloads. Site mirroring can increase site ranking in search engines by spamming the search engine index. Site mirroring can be used to preserve historic content in cases where the web administrator can no longer afford to keep the information available. Site mirroring can also protect our freedom of the press by exposing classified government information and mirroring it around the world preventing the government from being able to fully remove its contents.
