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Our System &
Network
WebClick Hosting recognizes that
down time is not an option for your website. That's why we invest heavily in hardware and
facilities that ensure our clients are up and running on the web 24 hours a day, seven
days a week.
FASTER THAN OC3 CONNECTIVITY
WebClick Hosting's Network Operations Center in Baltimore, Maryland is "OnNet"
with Frontier Global Center (FGC), which means that we have a direct fiber optic
connection between our Cisco 7200 router and theirs. Being OnNet with a Tier-1 provider
means that we don't just link to a backbone, we are actually on a backbone. We have no
phone circuit, and do not use a telecom link to get to the Internet; instead, we have an
in-house connection directly to FGC's ATM fiber node, located a few floors below our
servers in the same building. This fiber optic line, with FGC's Dense Wave Division
Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, handles several times the bandwidth of an OC3.
MULTIPLE BACKBONES
We share the digital distribution architecture of FGC, which is comprised of more than
25 high-speed private peering connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint,
UUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, and others. FGC also has high-speed links to 8 public
exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS.
We even work around other systems' slow
connections
Sometimes, even though your account with WebClick Hosting is functioning properly, there
may still be a slow data transfer rate. The reason for this is that the Internet sends
information all over the country and the world through a dozen or more computers --
and something is always getting serviced somewhere in that long chain. Here is what we
have done to speed things up:
Route Optimization:
We have a large investment in BGP (Border Gate Protocol) technology, which allows the
traffic to your site to travel more efficiently by finding the best route for data to
travel. On a typical server the traffic always takes the same route from client to server.
For them, if there is a bad node, traffic does not get through at all. Because we use BGP
protocol, different and more efficient routes are taken between client and server
depending on traffic loads and broken nodes. This means our servers automatically look for
the fastest route available.
Low Latency/High Throughput:
Often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity,
and as a result the corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms for each hop along the
net. WebClick Hosting network's daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak
spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity. Our transfer times range from 15 to 80ms routinely.
Web Servers
WebClick Hosting's web servers are custom-built industrial machines designed for a
24/7 web serving environment. All of our servers are equipped with dual redundant 450-watt
power supplies, hot swap Fujitsu drives and force-filtered cooling systems. Our Network
Operations Center (NOC) is equipped with standby machines, industry-leading Liebert
uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and a temperature-controlled environment, all
located in a secure, monitored facility.
Force Filtered Cooling
All the drives, motherboards, and power supplies in our NOC are in cases with a
positive pressure filtered-air environment. Two large fans pull filtered air into the
protective case, and the components within are cooled by fans which circulate this
purified air. The constant introduction of clean air into the case creates a positive
pressure environment ensuring that dust and particles can't get in.
Hot Swap Fujitsu Drives
The drives and drive bays of our servers are all constructed from high-grade aluminum,
and rest in a Shock Mounted Drive Cage, which adds to the durability of the hardware. We
back up our servers nightly. If the industrial grade drive were to fail, all we would have
to do is copy the backup (never more than 24 hours old) onto a standby machine which is
already on-line. The site would be up and running within a matter of minutes.
Redundant Hot Swap Power Supplies
Each server has dual-redundant hot swap power supplies. If one of these power supplies
were to fail, the server would not go down because each power supply is capable of running
the server by itself, indefinitely. Meanwhile, alarms would alert our technicians to the
problem; they would restore redundancy with one of our spares and then service the failed
supply unit. During all this, sites on our network would never be down.
Standby Servers
We keep spares on-line of all CPU configurations. If the server were to experience a
hardware failure we would literally turn a key, grab the handle on the drive, pull it out,
and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We would reboot the second machine and the
server would be up and running again in a matter of minutes.
What Does This Mean For You?
It means your website is incredibly secure from failures or downtime. It means your
website is up and running as near to 100% of the time as it's conceivably possible to get.
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