Why We're Different
In traditional web hosting, several sites reside on a single hard drive, inside a single server, connected to the Internet through a single network connection. It's a simple setup with one big problem: if any part fails the whole system goes down, and your website suddenly stop responding.
Most small businesses have experienced the dreaded call from a customer notifying them that their website is down. A quick call to the web hosting company is met by a technician indicating they are working on the server or restoring the drive or whatever....and then you wait. No email, no online orders and no online promotion of your business.
Often, all your data is being stored on one server, or worse one shared hard drive. If the hard drive failed or the data is corrupted, you may have to wait hours for the data to be restored, assuming your provider is backing up your data regularly.
Our solution was to take a different approach to hosting, by utilizing the enterprise-level architecture and strategies used by fortune 500 companies. Their systems are designed for redundancy, reliability and security, and that's just what we're looking for in our hosting platform. In our system, each website is deployed across a cluster of servers, working seamlessly together, and ready to reroute web traffic should any component experience unusually high loads or in the event any component fails. By utilizing RAID technology across the server cluster, if a server "crashes" or a hard drive fails, the other servers in the cluster take over immediately, without losing any data.
We're different--and for good reason. The advanced architecture powering our hosting solution uses groups of high-performance hard drives to reliably serve every web page, image, and email. Inside each server, drives are mirrored to each other in a RAID configuration to create a first level of redundancy. Then, advanced software clusters the storage devices into logical groups, where files are instantly and automatically replicated across each device. And, as a final precautionary measure, all data on the system is automatically backed up continuously.
Hybrid Server Cluster vs Shared Server
With your content stored securely, the next task is to make sure it's available each and every time it's requested. This is another area where we've taken a decidedly different approach to hosting. Most small hosting companies attempt to squeeze as many websites as they can onto each server. Sharing a server means every time a neighboring website is doing an update or transferring large amounts of data, your site slows down or worse case, it can stops completely.
Our use of advanced clustering technology routes each online request made by a site visitor to a cluster of load balanced IIS and Apache webservers. Should any server in the cluster not respond, requests are instantly routed to the next available server, so the website visitor never experiences a single interruption. Seems to us to be a better approach. Not only does your site benefit from redundancy, backup technolgy and bottle-neck rerouting, but by utilizing server clustering technology we are able to offer mixed platforms for every account. Now you can make use of MySQL, ASP.net, PHP and Java all on the same website. This enables webmasters to make use of a variety of technologies, and pick the ones that do the job best.
Freedom of choice, seems right to us.....