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Beyond the Hype – Data Center Ratings & Your IT

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 by William Toll

Data center ratings have become an increasingly popular marketing point for dedicated web and application hosting providers, but what do those ratings really mean, and how do they impact the success of your business? By understanding how data centers are evaluated and scored, you can make a more informed decision about your specific business needs and maximize the value of your IT costs.

Depending on your point of view, you may focus on certain data center features when reviewing managed hosting and colocation providers. Some businesses are concerned with connectivity, others with environmental features, or physical security, or routing protocols; it’s a long and diverse list. At the heart of every individual concern is an overriding one and it’s the same for every business- uptime. As anyone who has spent time reading and evaluating service level guarantees (SLAs) knows, there are a lot of ways uptime can be defined.

Data center ratings ideally provide a standardized, industry accepted means to fairly and objectively review data centers, so customers can cut through the marketing hype and truly understand the differences when making important business decisions. In practice however, this hasn’t fully been the case.
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Monitoring- the secret weapon for your business

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 by William Toll

In the IT world, performance and uptime monitoring are like bridge tenders. That is to say, no one pays much attention to them until something goes wrong. It’s an approach that more businesses should rethink. Having a solid monitoring procedure in place can yield significant benefits to intelligence gathering and decision making, as well as optimizing daily operations.

One of the first places to focus on when developing a monitoring system is for server and process uptime. As most of us have experienced firsthand with home computers, the fact that the computer is up and operational is no guarantee that your desired program is running. Identify all the critical applications it takes to deliver your web site and other services. This would include your HTTP server software, DNS, inbound and outbound mail server applications, authentication servers, and anything else particular to your environment. Your process and uptime monitoring scheme should also include IPs for internal and external server interfaces, routers and switches, network attached storage devices, and any other important hardware with an interface reachable with PING or other network monitoring protocols.

It is helpful for administrators to have visibility into the other systems that deliver your web site and network applications, for example, temperature, humidity, and power in the operating environment where your infrastructure is deployed. If you have peering with multiple backbone providers, you’d want to know the health of those network connections. You’ll also want to monitor resources like processor overhead, memory usage, and available storage space. When it comes to monitoring, more is almost always better, and the information you gain from monitoring processes has a hidden value.
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Why NaviSite – Dedicated Hosting – History & Leadership

Monday, April 20th, 2009 by Sumeet Sabharwal

One of the problems that SMBs have to deal with in the Web 2.0 business environment is finding reliable partners and providers. In a world of acquisitions and mergers, startups and spin offs, when ‘cutting edge’ is the order of the day, it’s hard to find companies with an established track record. Hard, but not impossible.
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Why NaviSite – Dedicated Hosting – 100% Guaranteed Service Level Agreements

Friday, April 17th, 2009 by William Toll

When it comes to Service Level Agreements, talk is cheap, but downtime is expensive. Many service providers boast of 99% SLAs, but when you read the fine print there’s actually a lot of wiggle room. Here’s a typical scenario- Provider X promises 99.9% annual uptime with a money back guarantee. This means that in the course of the year, you won’t exceed more than 52 minutes of downtime. For the purposes of this example, let’s say that you have an outage that lasts an hour, which means the SLA is applicable and you are owed a refund.
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Judged by the company it keeps- Your managed dedicated hosting provider

Friday, April 3rd, 2009 by William Toll

We’re judged by the company we keep. It’s human nature, and while it might not always be fair, spend time with unsavory characters and people will draw conclusions. When it comes to comparing the networks of managed dedicated server hosts, we’d be wise to follow this advice.

The fact is not all data networks are created equal. High end servers, fiber optic cables, and blistering fast routers and switches don’t do any good if they don’t talk to anything, but all too often small and medium sized business end up putting too much focus on the back end infrastructure. The obvious example is a shiny new shopping mall, but the only way to get to it is by driving down a long unpaved road.

A data center that has connectivity to multiple backbone peers delivers redundancy to the servers that are hosted there, but that is just one benefit, and in some ways not even the greatest one. The risk of losing customers or users due to a total network outage isn’t what it used to be. Even consumer grade connections are more reliable than ever before. The trick isn’t simply having a reliable connection; it’s having the fastest connection possible.
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Why NaviSite Dedicated Hosting – Fast Networking

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 by Sumeet Sabharwal

For SMBs a lot depends on maintaining an internet presence, whether for direct retail sales, customer communications, or a host of other demands, success is measured in milliseconds. When someone visits your web site for the first time, the slightest delay in loading the page can mean the difference between gaining a new customer or that person moving on to a competitor’s faster web site.
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Why NaviSite Dedicated Hosting – Free Server Management

Friday, March 27th, 2009 by Sumeet Sabharwal

The fact is, most small and medium sized businesses don’t have the personnel or capital resources to handle managing important server infrastructure. When you get a managed dedicated server from NaviSite, you haven’t just outsourced a piece of hardware. You also get end to end management at no additional charge. From OS management to ongoing maintenance to parts and upgrades, it’s all taken care of for you by our team of Always There support engineers.
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Five key things to look for in Service Level Agreements

Friday, February 27th, 2009 by William Toll

All SLAs are not created equal.  If you’ve spent any time comparing managed dedicated server hosting providers, chances are you’ve seen a lot of emphasis put on Service Level Agreements (SLAs).  Sure, 99.9% uptime sounds great, but what does that really mean, and how do you know your provider is living up to it?  Here are 5 key points to consider-
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Tis’ the season for NaviSite Dedicated Hosting’s Shared Load Balancer

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 by William Toll

NaviSite small business Dedicated Hosting customers know that this time of the year Internet traffic begins to pick up measurably. Ecommerce begins to soar as consumers begin researching and buying goods and services online. Financial and insurance firms experience an end of the year rush to prepare for the new year of taxes. Small businesses run end of year reports.

Given the explicit cost of attracting clicks and visitors, businesses need to make every visitor count! Every request to a dedicated server is important! Delays, time-outs and server slow-downs are not acceptable, this time of the year or any time of the year for that matter!

A Shared or Dedicated Load Balancer accepts the traffic and distributes it evenly between servers, ensuring access to your servers is available, even on peak days like big ecommerce day: “Black Friday”.

NaviSite has been providing enterprise class load balancing solutions for over a decade. Depending on their need and scale, our SMB dedicated server customers can opt for either our Shared or Dedicated Load Balancer solution. Our Shared Load Balancer solution is hardware based and configured in pairs with a high degree of redundancy, making it extremely suitable for high performance web sites or applications. A hardware load balancer is far superior to a software solution offered by the competition as the processing of requests is done on the highly tuned load balancer, not your servers. As most customers are looking to achieve server availability and performance in a simple, elegant way, we have architected the perfect shared solution. It’s almost – set and forget!

Our Shared Load Balancers are built using Citrix® NetScalers®, a purpose-built dedicated hardware application platform that provides an optimized traffic management solution, enabling increased Web application availability. We have enabled the Load Balancer to send traffic in a round robin configuration to the multiple servers our customers select. Additionally, the service features session persistence mechanisms to ensure a consistent experience. With the capability to support the bandwidth and connections that our customers need, and a reasonable price per server connected, we believe this is the best solution at the best price in the market.

The solution we deliver is completely managed in all aspects. We manage the network and the device. We create the profiles for your solution. You run your applications and manage your business. Your Website visitors and application users will appreciate your thoughtful planning and desire to provide the optimum experience.

NaviSite Dedicated Servers can be connected to our Dedicated or Shared Load Balancers for as little as $100 per server, per month. Call or click here to order a dedicated hosting package today.

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