What Servers do you use at RackType?
Well, at RackType we don't have any server's other than the company e-mail server. However the RackSpace we
lease and retail to you and your customers as an end user are all based on Twin Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz HT (Hyper-threading) Chipsets with
512K Cache. The servers are running Red Hat Linux 9.0 and have a total installed memory of 1GB DDR & EEC Reg Memory.
Well if you don't have any servers, how can you call yourselves a web hosting company?
Are you serious? Have you got a firm grasp of what sort of capital investment in infrastructure is required
to establish a web hosting facility? No, look being an Australian based company, and working from a small base the most sound business
decision we can make to deliver an extremely competitive and robust business grade hosting service to our clients and theirs is to outsource
the physical infrastructure and network environment from one of the largest most experience IT infrastructure companies on this planet.
That's all well and good, but are going to tell me who? and where this company is?
Sure, we don't mind, in fact our reliable and competitive service is based on the contractual arrangements provided
to us that guarantee that the server will always be available to serve web pages and send and receive a companies email. Our ultimate upstream
IT infrastructure provider is "The Planet" based in Dallas Texas, USA.
Why do you use a US based server, I've been told by others that this is a bad idea?
A few things way in when looking at how to provide quality hosting and price is not the first. In fact the first
thing we need to know is all about Quality Assurances & Support. When we started RackType we looked for a Guarantee that the server
would never, ever be 'down' or as damb close to that sort of commitment as possible. The outcome is that we have a contract with our supplier
- know as a Service Level Agreement (SLA) - Which is common form of agreement used in the provision and delivery of commercial telecommunication
services - that not more than 5 minutes of 'down' time will occur in any given month and usually a third or less (if any) disruptions to
the service we provide can be reasonably expected. That is peace of mind.
But if my web server is in the USA it's going to take AGGEEEESSSsss for my pages to load!
Well that's just patently false. The internet works in a way that changes the paradigm of what you may have come
to expect based or real world experiences. Now logic tells you that the USA is a lonnnnggggg from Australia right? Anyone that's taken
a 20 hour flight can tell you that! But here's a question for you, Which will load first, a web page viewed in Sydney but hosted in Indonesia
or the same webpage viewed in Sydney but hosted in the USA? A: Well yes you picked the setup! The page hosted in America would load faster,
mostly because is global trunking is via America, actually adding to it's transmission time.. The pages hosted in Indonesia (Our nearest
northern Neighbour) actually leave the pacific - go to the US - and then take a return path to Australia. Exhausting huh? But wait, putting
this double journey into perspective it is likely to add around 1,800 - 2,500 millisecond to the response time (latency) but have no impact
on actual load time. What does that mean? Well the global Internet has bandwidth that massively exceeds what your website needs, how else
do you think you ISP could have more than 10 or 20 subscribers if it did not, let along the 1000's of users you ISP is likely to have.
The short answer here is - If your are being told that the hosting of your site in the USA is slower than Australia then they are misleading
you or they are referring to the part of a second (yes, fraction of a second) that may be detectable by tracing line speeds with tools
like 'PING' and 'TRACEROUTE' which in reality don't have much use outside IT professionals.
But can't you buy Australian!
Well again, price was not our premiere consideration in looking for a supplier, but it is a factor in putting a
competitive product into the market. The hard fact is - Telstra holds a monopoly of the network infrastructure in Australia. This means
that the wholesale rates charged by Telstra to suppliers like "The Planet" if they wanted to setup a commercial operation here
is very high. Telstra is not subject to the same competitive pressures that exists in the USA. The consequences also extend beyond the
higher pricing structure of network bandwidth wholesalers face. Competition and diversity in the wholesale telecommunications sector in
the USA also provide a data centre operations like "The Planet" multiple homed connections, which means that is a wholesale network
is down, or experiencing heavier than usual traffic "The Planet" can dynamically re-route our pages via one of the Ten(10) commercial
telecommunications backbones at the data centre. Now there are a number of data centers trying to operate here in Australia but they are
just unable to give use the (SLA) - Multiple Homed Backbones or Low Price Point on Bandwidth that we demand to provide the best possible
hosting service to our clients.
