Recently, INetU was approached by a national magazine who needed a unique solution from their hosting provider. The client told us they were committed to going forward with a WordPress implementation to handle their blog. While they didn’t want to have comments enabled on the blog, they were committed to using WordPress…
At INetU, our ability to support all of your needs is what defines us as an organization. The following example describes how we’re helping businesses like yours make their hosting solution better!
Unless you’re reading this blog from a time machine and call 1984 “home”, you’ve probably considered deploying virtualization or utilizing some cloud resources for your business already. Maybe you’re development team has already begun reaping the benefits of a virtualized environment and you’re wondering how much of that might benefit production too.
First things first, let’s define what options are out there:
RAID-5 was long hailed as the enterprise-level storage solution and a fit for nearly every application. The truth is, RAID-5 was designed back in the 80’s to save cost without completely sacrificing redundancy. Back then the cost per byte for storage on enterprise-class drives was so expensive that researchers were scrambling for a solution to store more data for less money.
Let’s say you needed 100MB of storage space and disk-level redundancy. Let’s also say, a 20MB SCSI drive cost $1,000.00. Before RAID-5, you’d buy 10 drives, create 5 RAID-1 arrays at 20MB each, and split your data set up to fit across these 5 separate arrays. Not only is this expensive at $10,000.00, but the storage space you require is split across 5 arrays. With RAID-5, 6 20MB disks gave you 100MB of space, and redundancy. That saves $4,000.00 per storage unit implemented! Sure, there were caveats, but with those kinds of savings, nobody was paying attention.
Welcome to the 21st century. The database is king, and everyone wants performance! Unfortunately, one of RAID-5’s biggest caveats is sacrificing performance, and developers and admins are finally starting to notice. Let’s take a look at the 5 biggest caveats of the RAID level most synonymous with enterprise storage for so many years:
Do you know who your internet neighbors are?
Would you buy a lot, build a house, and move your family in if the next-door neighbor was a notorious drug kingpin? Of course not!
It’s important to consider that “where” your business “lives” online is just as important. I’m not talking about your URL or domain name; I’m talking about the Net block your IP addresses are assigned from, and who the company providing them is.
Spam, adult-oriented sites, and gambling sites generate lots of revenue. They can afford the same servers, support, and bandwidth your business can. They also attract a lot of negative attention in the form of Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks, hacking attempts, and probably the worst: blocking and filtering from legitimate networks and mail servers.
When network operators and email system administrators see lots of spam or non-legitimate traffic from a given network, they’ll often block it. Sure, some legitimate traffic is blocked along with the bad, but it’s typically impossible or too costly to differentiate the good from the bad. If the owner of a Net block has a reputation for continuing to do business with clients that generate “negative attention”, an administrator will often block/filter all of the net blocks owned or operated by that provider.
This all happens behind the scenes and often completely unknown to you.
