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 can handle the bandwidth of a T3 or an OC3, and with FGC's Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it can handle 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. To use an analogy, the private peering connections allow data to travel from New York to LA on a non-stop flight, while the public exchanges require a stop over. Sometimes the Net is slow... What happens when your pipe is hooked up to a faucet that just trickles? Sometimes even though your ISP and your web host are both functioning properly, you may still have a slow data transfer rate. The Internet sends information all over the country and the world, through a dozen or more computers on its way to you -- 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. Linux Web Host network 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 Linux web host'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 remain out. 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.