Technical Reasons to Choose Us for Your Website Hosting

Scalable Connectivity

Network Redundancy

Network Reliability

Raw Performance equals Low Latency/High Throughput

Top-Notch Servers

Industrial Strength Equipment Provides Performance and Reliability

Scalable Connectivity

Multiple full T-3's from Qwest communications and Frontier Global Center provide our clients with a secure, fast, redundant connection. Our servers are housed in a state-of-the-art, teleco grade, data center. The NOC, which is located in Baltimore, Maryland, is unusual in several ways: It has a unique "OnNet" connection to two tier-one backbone providers. The connection is a scalable, bandwidth-on-demand connection. Our backbone providers have substantial redundant peering arrangements, creating great reliability. The end result is that over 90% of your traffic will be exchanged in private peering arrangements and travels from our network well under their guaranteed network speed of 80 ms. This combination results in an extremely low packet loss and latency.

Frontier GlobalCenter (FGC) whose 13,000-mile fiber optic network and Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology provide an enormous 460 Gbps of capacity worldwide, has an ATM fiber node located just a few floors below the  NOC. With our OnNetconnection, fiber optic cable runs inside the building directly from the NOC to the GlobalCenter point of presence, placing us right on their network. In addition to our connection with GlobalCenter, we also make use of Qwest Communications for an OnNet high-speed connection to their backbone very similar to the one with GlobalCenter (FGC).

Qwest comes into Baltimore with an OC-12 line, and plans to upgrade their connection to an OC-48 in the near future. The Qwest connection enables NeTrafic to offer additional redundancy and better routes to Europe, Latin America, and Asia. With both of these two carriers, our router will have up to 150,000 possible routes to send each packet of traffic. Industry analysis reveals that 70% of downtime over 10 hours with any ISP is caused by telephone circuit failure. Because of the direct fiber optic connection between our Cisco 7200 router and theirs, NeTrafic does not need to link to the Internet though an OC3 or T3 Telecom circuit. With this unique arrangement, circuit failure is virtually eliminated.

Some web providers operate an additional dial-up Internet service with 1000's of users that slow down their connection to the Internet. Remember, we are not Internet Access providers --our scalable bandwidth lines are entirely dedicated to serving!

Network Redundancy

Studies have shown that the second most common reason for downtime is circuit failure on the tier 1 backbone, that is why we have two tier one providers.  If one has problems we can route traffic down the other one.  Furthermore, because we are OnNet with Frontier GlobalCenter and Qwest we share their digital distribution architecture, which includes private peering network connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, EUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, @Home, IBM Advantis and others.  These private peering arrangements allow NeTrafic to exchange packets of data with every major backbone carrier in a one-to-one environment quickly and efficiently.  In addition, FGC has high-speed links to 8 public exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS.  Through these many public exchanges, customers have the ability to reach their site wherever they are coming from on the Internet.  Thus we have the best of both worlds: a network that is both efficient and wide reaching.

Network Reliability

Industry analysis reveals that 70% of downtime over 10 hours with any ISP is caused by telephone circuit failure. Since our NOC is just 13 floors above Frontier GlobalCenter in the same building, circuit failure is virtually eliminated because there is no phone circuit between us and FGC. Instead, there is a direct -connection between our Cisco 7200 router and theirs. The second most common reason for downtime is circuit failure on the Tier 1 backbone. GlobalCenter, themselves a backbone, also have peer connections with other major Tier 1 providers, which allows traffic to be switched to other backbones quickly in the event of a crisis. How reliable is this? Yahoo is another fine company who connects directly using only Frontier GlobalCenter. If you can reach Yahoo, you can reach our network. FGC's ground-breaking 460 Gbps network runs BGP to 25 other major carriers through private peering arrangements, providing the fastest, most efficient and most reliable network available today.

Raw Performance equals 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. NeTrafic's network daily verage is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity. NeTrafic guarantees that we'll carry you to the Frontier GlobalCenter Sonet Ring at the heart of the FGC backbone in less than 80ms over a five minute average at any time of day or night or we'll give you that month free.

Top-Notch Servers

Your site will be hosted on one of our "state of the art" high performance Linux servers. We are continually upgrading our equipment to be the fastest and most reliable in the industry, so you can be assured your website will be accessible 24/7. Our servers come with "hot swappable" hard drives, so that if a drive fails, our technicians can install a replacement in seconds. We also use 100% redundant power supplies, so there will be no down time due to a power failure. All servers are backed up nightly on our 288 gigabyte SCSI arrays and then stored on tape for safe keeping. Our equipment is continually monitored for problems and our system administrators are constantly checking on performance, security and network conductivity. This is what we consider "Top Notch"!

Industrial Strength Equipment Provides Performance and Reliability

We realize that down time is not an option for your server. We have invested heavily in hardware and facilities to ensure that your site will remain up and running on the web 24 hours a day, seven days a week. NeTrafic  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 uninterruptable 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 of our computers are in cases with a positive pressure filtered air environment. Two large fans pull air into the protective case through filters, 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 nsuring that dust and particulates are swept out and never in.

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 your industrial grade drive were to fail, all we would have to do is copy your backup (never more than 24 hours old) onto a standby machine which is already on-line. Your 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, your site would never be down.

Standby Servers

We keep spares on-line of all CPU configurations. If your server were to experience a hardware failure we would literally turn a key, grab the handle on your drive, pull it out, and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We'd reboot the second machine and your site would be up and running again in a matter of minutes.

Smooth, Clean, Redundant Uninterruptable Power System

To guard against local power failures, we have invested in an industrial strength Liebert UPSsystem. It acts as a back-up battery, maintaining uninterrupted power in case of surges or power outages. In addition to this high quality power system, the NeTrafic NOC is also equipped with a natural gas generator. With these backup systems in place, we can keep our network up and running indefinitely without relying on the building's power. This is just another example of the commitment we have to keeping your site up 24/7 no matter what situation arises.

Transfering Your Site To AspenSites/NeTrafic from another hosting service

        Step 1: Contact us and pay for a hosting package - we will do the legwork to initiate the transfer

Step 2: Within a day you will receive an email from us stating your account has been set up and issuing you an IP number.

Step 3: Transfer your content and test your site on our server with your IP number. You use the IP number just like a domain name. For example, if we give you an IP number of 209.239.33.2, you can put that number in a browser as http://209.239.33.2 to see what your pages will look like on our server.

Step 4: Send the domain transfer request that are sent to you via email to hostmaster@internic.net indicating to them your agreement in switching

Step 5: The InterNIC will contact you so that you can verify the domain name transfer. This usually happens one or two days after you send in your order. Once you verify the transfer, the InterNIC will point your domain name to our name server, and the rest of the world will be able to access your new site on our server with the domain name. At that point you can contact your old hosting service and ask them to take your site down from their servers.

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