What type of software/hardware does Hostasaurus use?

Shared Hosting Servers:

• Dell PowerEdge enterprise servers with four-hour on-site support contracts
• Redundant hot-swap power supplies
• Guaranteed temperature and humidity
• Battery & generator backed-up power sources with 48 hours of on-site fuel
• Hardware-based RAID disk arrays
• A minimum of dual Intel Xeon processors
• Always 2 GB of memory or greater
• Automated, nightly tape backup with off-site rotation for disaster recovery

Dedicated Hosting Servers:

• Dedicated servers are custom configured based on client requirements ranging from single processor custom servers to Dell PowerEdge standard servers to quad-processor Dell PowerEdge enterprise servers
• All of the same non-server-specific advantages our shared servers have such as a security controlled and environmentally regulated facility, identical connectivity and our superior support
• Mirrored ATA/100 drives as a minimum with SCSI and hardware RAID optional. We will guarantee minimum sustained writing speed of 35 MB/sec on the ATA/100 systems. The SCSI and hardware RAID systems can go slightly faster but are typically used because they can handle more operations per second. A drive failure in any dedicated server will not result in lost data or unscheduled down time.
• Optional hot-swappable redundant power supplies
• Guaranteed temperature and humidity
• Battery & generator backed-up power sources with 48 hours of on-site fuel
• A minimum of 768 MB of memory
• Automated, nightly tape backup with off-site rotation for disaster recovery
• 99.95% monthly availability service level agreements are available on annual contracts. Additional service level committments are available for servers configured with redundant power supplies.

The Backup System:

• The Hostasaurus backup software is NetBackup Data Center from Veritas. It is a high end enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery package.
• Hostasaurus backup hardware consists of a 25 Terabyte tape library and a pair of 10 Terabyte tape libraries, all from ADIC. This allows us to maintain much longer backup retention times than most hosts.
• Every shared and dedicated Hostasaurus server is backed up nightly. Full backups are generally kept for eight weeks with off-site duplications of each weekend's full backup being kept in a safe location for disaster recovery.

The Software:

• The Linux operating system, current kernel versions, with FTP and/or Secure Shell (SSH) access
• The Apache web server with the following features:
  • Support for PHP, Perl, other CGI, and SHTML (SSI) web pages
  • Support for any MIME types you need, such as Shockwave Flash, etc.
  • Support for CGI scripts & programs
  • Support for password restricted areas of your site
  • Support for multiple sub-domains, i.e., www.yourdomain.com, news.yourdomain.com, etc
  • MOD_SSL to support your secure web pages with your certificates or ours
  • Access log reports, with statistics, errors, referrers, bandwidth usage
• The qmail secure mail server with the following features:
  • Autoresponder support
  • POP3 and IMAP mail client support, as well as encrypted POP3 and IMAP
  • Web based email
• Lyris Mailing-List Software with the following features:
  • Web based management
  • Bounced message and address handling
  • List address at yourdomain.com
  • Subscription reports
  • Autoresponders, custom messages

The Network:

• The Hostasaurus.Com network is built around equipment from Foundry Networks, a leader in performance and reliability. Our Foundry equipment extends from the edge where all server switches have redundant power and one uplink to each of our redundant core routers. From the core, traffic continues to one of our multiple border routers and then on to the Internet. Our redundancy allows us to lose multiple routers along the path in and out of our network while suffering no outage. Unlike many web hosts, we own and operate our own routers, and control our IP address ranges and our Internet connectivity. If you would like us to give you a summary of what we can see about another host's network using standard tools, just ask, it may be quite different than their website claims. Many companies that pretend to operate their own servers and network equipment are reselling services from another company's facilities they've never even visited.

• Our Internet connectivity is a mix of high-bandwidth connections from Level 3, UUNet (MCI), Time Warner Telecom, AT&T and Cogent. The majority of our traffic is allowed to naturally choose amongst the first four providers with Cogent primarily being used for just communications with Cogent customers and ISP's who force their traffic to prefer Cogent. We have real Internet connections with all of the aforementioned providers, be careful when evaluating a host because some will show off two companies as their Internet providers even if one just provides the physical cable to the second company and has nothing to do with the Internet connection; the big difference is that connections to two companies is redundant, connections to one company using cable from a second means you now have two points of failure instead of one.

  Three of our five providers, Level3, UUNet and AT&T, are three of the largest global network operators on the planet. Our choice of providers allows much of the traffic to and from the Hostasaurus network to get much closer, if not to, its destination before it has to be transferred off onto a different network of possibly lower quality, if at all; this results in better performance for your visitors and customers as compared to hosting companies using lower quality Internet providers. Having multiple providers also gives us a competitive advantage over other hosting providers who have one or more connections to the same provider, because if that provider has an issue anywhere with traffic on their network, it can't be avoided. We currently have a sum of 3444 Mbits/sec of active bandwidth across all providers and the ability to increase that nearly limitlessly (32+ Gbit/sec) without any hardware changes.

• Our Internet connectivity is to providers who are all present in the same data center with us and ALL of them utilize multiple physical paths in to, and out of, the building for their fiber routes.

The Location:

• Our servers are located in Level 3's Tampa data center. It is one of 70+ centers the billion-dollar corporation operates. The facility is hurricane-rated and outside of flood zones. We share the building with numerous major internet providers and large corporations, including several of the largest dial-up and voice providers in the country. Hands-on server support is available from Hostasaurus 24 hours per day on every day of the year. Equipment is protected from fire by industrial fire extinguishing systems and the facility is protected from unauthorized entry by a dual-stage two-factor system. The security system consists of RF card with PIN number access for external entry and palm scan biometric security for internal access to the datacenter. 24 hour security is present to watch over those with access to the equipment. Redundant heating and cooling is standard with a guaranteed 70° F ± 5° F temperature and 50% ± 5% relative humidity. Uninterruptible power supplies keep the power on to all equipment and generator back-up is on-site with a minimum of 48 hours of fuel available.