Web Site Hosting
Web hosting, but not as you know it…
If you are familiar with cPanel hosting accounts you probably would not notice any difference, initially. You can create email accounts, databases, sub domains, run backups etc. as usual. The differences lie under the surface…
The server has extremely high specifications. It is highly capable, highly available and basically under utilised.
Our VPS is 1/16 part of a mega server which has
4 x Quad Core 3.0 GHz processors (usually only 3% utilised)
16 GB of DDR2 ECC RAM
Our VPS is guaranteed 1GB, but the rest is available if not being used.
Of our guaranteed 1GB the peak usage last week was 252 MB and of that 177MB is utilised by base services.
So effectively, last week the server used 75 MB max at its peak load to serve web pages while having 748 MB guaranteed min available to serve more pages.
4 x 146GB 15,000 RPM SCSI Hard Drives (configured as hardware RAID 10)
RAID-10 is “mirrored stripes”, or, a RAID-1 array of two RAID-0 arrays.
It combines the speed of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1.
Any file can read (or written) half from one striped disk and half from the other striped disk.(which is about 50% faster apparently)
Any disk can fail, then be hot swapped for a new blank disk without the array failing (the new disk begins copying its mirror as soon as it is installed.)
Even though the server is powerful we go to great lenghts to conserve its resources.
Static sites use negligable amounts of cpu cycles and ram when they serve a web page. They consume a tiny amount of disk access time, send the file on its way and allow the server then return to an idle state in milliseconds. Dynamic sites work differently. They generally run between 10 and 50 database queries, manipulate the output with a scripting language, holding output blocks in memory while waiting for the process to complete. This process consumes cpu cycles, ram and time. When the next page request comes it does this all over again.
Even though Our Server is comparitively fast at doing this (about 1 second) we have a better solution.
We get the server to save the completed page to file before it completes. When the page is requested next we get the server to serve the cached version of the page. This is lightning fast (usually less than 200ms) and uses no more cpu cycles or ram than a static page.
To go one step further we usually schedule the cache files to delete then regenerate automatically so that a web site visitor never gets the 1 second load.
Because only our clients use this server we know that all sites are using these resource friendly methods.
You get great neighbours.
They are our web site clients, no-one else. They don’t spam or hack or do anything that is likely to get a server a bad name, compromise its security or abuse it’s resources.
The server is well located for Australian visitors with a network latency of 40ms to 60ms for most of the East Coast and 70ms to 90ms for visitors from Perth.
The server is at the Global Switch datacenter in Harris St. Ultimo, Sydney.
It is considered to be one of the premium datacenters in the Southern Hemisphere.
This is a graph of 10 pings to awebplan.com.au from a computer 400km away.
It shows an average network latency of about 30ms.
In contrast the following graph shows 10 pings from Australia to wikipedia.org in Dallas, USA. It shows an average network latency of about 340ms per connection. A web page is generally made up of multiple files and often requires multiple connections to access them. Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page as a real world example, (it consists of 35 files and made 4 connections to access them when viewed using Firefox 3.6) then 340ms x 4 = 1.36 seconds would be added to the page load time due to network latency alone.
On-site diesel tanks (360kL) with full-capacity generator fall-back in case of extended power failure.
State-of-the-art cooling system helps ensure hardware stability.
Sophisticated fire detection and suppression system.
Access to multiple telecommunications providers so as to be not dependent on any one telecomunications system.
Highly secure facility with security guards on site 24/7.
More information about the datacenter can be found at Global Switch website.