Over the past several months, we have become aware of room
for improvement with our hosting service. Today we are proud to say that we
have completed the first steps toward providing a better web hosting solution
to our customers. Our proprietary Content Management System, Javelin CMS, has
been migrated to a redundant server platform and is now fully operational for
all existing Javelin clients. What this means for those clients is a more
reliable hosting service; less outages, faster page loads and most importantly,
more secure transfer and storage of your data. Let us tell you how this makes our hosting better than other Oklahoma City Web Design firms.
Fully Redundant
Our Oklahoma Web Design clients need their websites in order
to fully function as a business. Many of our customers even rely solely on
their websites as a source of revenue. So what kind of hosting company would we
be if we didn’t have a contingency plan in place knowing this? Most design
firms rely on Virtual Private Servers (see: VPS (Virtual Private Server)) or
even third-party (reseller) hosting services to run their customers’
websites. These services are often
unreliable and can lead to hours of unexpected downtime.
Our company has over 11 years of experience in the web design and hosting
industries. Our new hosting platform is managed entirely by us,
removing the middle man and protecting your business from the potential of
hours of downtime. This new platform also contains no Single Points of Failure,
which means even if a crucial piece of hardware or software were to stop
functioning properly; a redundant pair would take over its responsibilities virtually
immediately. Best of all, the new platform creates room for growth without the
need for scheduled maintenance to bring new services online. We can add and
subtract “nodes” from our hosting platform without taking down a single website
or service. This means that if a site of ours was to unexpectedly receive large
amounts of traffic due to enhanced media coverage, we would be able to bring new
nodes online to cope with the demand. This flexibility is instrumental in our
growth as a host of highly available websites and applications.
Reliable Backups
Since conception, we have built Javelin to create daily,
versioned backups of our customer’s websites. These backups are transferred to
several locations across the United States to ensure that the data cannot be
lost due to Mother Nature’s fury. These backups allow for Javelin site
administrators to request that their site be restored to any particular day within
the past 31 days, without incurring any downtime during the site restoration
process. Our data retention policy has helped many customers recover deleted
files that, in most cases, would be lost for good without proper backup
procedures.
Most web hosts prepare backups for their customers do not adhere to our strict backup policies. For instance, some hosts
create backups each night but only preserve the latest backup. Additionally, many
hosts opt to only maintain backups on the server which also hosts the original website
data. This practice is dangerous because it can result in both the original
website data and backups being lost following a hard disk failure or other
catastrophic server issues, including those caused by a natural disaster.
Very Secure
Our company uses security practices that rival most
financial institutions. Through our new hosting platform, we have created an
even more secure environment for your website data to be hosted on. Customer data
is stored across several servers adjacent (even geographically diverse) to the
server that is accessed by your visitors, dubbed the “Load Balancer”. This load
balancing server must request your website data from those servers before it can
display it to your visitors.
This setup creates a barrier between those visitors (or
possible attackers) and your website data, allowing our team to implement
security measures which identify threats before they can access your sensitive
information. All traffic between the load balancing server and the server
housing your data is encrypted with 256-bit encryption to prevent “sniffing”.
This level of encryption has been approved by the National Security Agency to
protect TOP SECRET government information from domestic and foreign terrorists.
Can the other guys say that?
This is only the beginning of what Back40 Design has to
offer to our highly-valued hosting customers. We plan to continue rolling out improvements
to Javelin CMS and to its hosting platform in an effort to increase the overall
stability and reliability of that service. With a 99.96% uptime in July, we are
proud of what has been accomplished and hope that you are to. We welcome any
feedback that you may have on the latest improvements and hope that you will
take the time to comment below.
