Our Service Provider
Our
service provider arm is Netserve Consultants Ltd who operate from our
offices in St Asaph and who specialise in the supply of domain
registration and hosting services to web developers across the UK.
After 7 years of trading they support over 9000 customers and manage
over 65,000 domain registrations.
Our Manchester network is
fully managed and multihomed using BGP4 which allows us to service
our customers via 3 100mbit diversely routed upstream service
providers. In addition to our upstream transit we peer with other UK
ISP's at Mcix (Manchester Commercial Internet Exchange) which will
soon include Manap (Manchester Network Access Point). Our peering
allows us to exchange our internet traffic directly with Tier 1 ISP's
such as BT, NTL, Telewest, Tiscali, Claranet, Legend and Zen meaning
that rather than connecting to 'the internet' we form an integral
part of it.
Our network includes two allocations of IP address
space being, /22 and /24 PI space (Provider Independent) allowing
considerable room for expansion in future years.
Not only does our network include reliability at it's core our facilities are spread over two separate facilities in Manchester allowing us to locate mission critical services in two different datacentres. We use the excellent facilities provided by Internet Facilitators Limited who are a neutral collocation facility owned and operated by the University of Manchester. Their datacentres provide the highest levels of on site and CCTV security, clean power with UPS and diesel backup, VESDA and FM200 fire suppression systems.
By
starting with a high quality collocation facility and network we can
then enhance our service further by using good quality server
hardware coupled with a high specification load balanced hosting and
email system. Many web hosting providers collocate or rent single
servers from larger companies on which to offer their hosting and
email services by combining many customers and services on each box.
With this approach there is little margin of error, room to expand,
or capacity to deal with hardware failures or spikes in traffic.
Our approach is to isolate services onto groups of servers (clusters)
which are fronted by high specification load balancers which deliver
the inbound web and email traffic to the next available server with
the lowest load. Should a server fail, our system will take it out of
service automatically and alert our staff who can deal with the issue
safe in the knowledge that the customer facing services are being
handled by the remaining servers in the cluster.
The system
allows us to deliver a range of services and service level guarantees
depending on the customers requirements. Standard services are
delivered from the shared hosting and mail clusters but for higher
availability, security or SLA's we can deliver services from pairs of
servers configured as a mini cluster, fronted by our load balancing
servers and backed by our redundant file storage system.