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Relationalhost has three separate connections to the Internet at our hosting
facility. There is a wireless WAN link with public ips routed to it, a
similar land based link, and a third land based connection on separate
media, which we use for special site setups with unusual requirements.
These are all connected to the same LAN segment the servers reside on.
These connections are widely separated on the Internet backbones and there
are over 20hops between them. What this means to our hosting customers is,
upstream problems are unlikely to affect more than one of the connections
at a time.
If one of our connections goes down, traffic automatically finds the
connection that is still running. If both main connections are up and
running then the traffic is balanced between them. A switch from one
connection to the other will take anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes to
take full effect across the Internet.
To get from the internet to our server and colocate networks, traffic
first passes through a set of redundant border routers with failover
capabilities, then through a pair of transparent ipless firewalls (also
with failover capabilities), and finally through a pair of gateway routers
which are also failover capable. The pairing of these devices ensures a
failure or maintenance will not affect uptime of the servers.
All systems are powered with UPS's attached to them with an approximate 1 hour uptime.
There are 2 backup generators hooked up to the power grid for the facility with automatic start on power failure. The generators can run for 8 hours without a refuel and extra fuel is onsite. RelationalHost was unaffected by the August 2003 blackout that affected most of Eastern North America. The hosting facility is on average occupied 24 hours a day.
Backups are made daily to removable hard drive media and stored offsite. A full disaster will take less than 72 hours to have fully restored service with our setup. A full disaster is basically total destruction of the hosting facility.
Major security patches from the software vendors that we use are usually applied within 24 hours of the security advisory being released. That combined with our firewall system ensure maximum protection from viruses, worms and other malicious attacks.
The servers and various software components are state of the art and utilization is carefully monitored. Emergency support for hosting is provided via pager and return email.
Our Firewall provides a state-of-the-art security infrastructure. Protection from many common Internet attacks is provided at the perimeter of the network. Ping's and traceroutes are disallowed.
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