We know that site availability is the top issue in the hosting business and we take it very seriously. Our systems includes high power UPS generators electrical backups, closed circuit monitoring and redundant air-conditioning systems. Our wide spread hardware infrastructure and additional systems enable us to provide solutions that are of the highest possible speed and quality.

Hosting Facilities

vURL.net operates two state of the art datacenter facilities located in Dallas, Texas. Both facilities offer complete redundancy in power, HVAC, fire suppression, network connectivity, and security. Both facilities sit atop multiple power grids driven by TXU electric, both facilities have multiple Liebert and PowerWare UPS battery backup power, and both facilities have onsite permanent generator power. Our HVAC systems are a combination of glycol, chilled water, and condenser units by Liebert and Data Aire to provide redundancy in cooling coupled with 6 managed backbone providers. Twelve more third party backbone providers are available in the building via cross connect. Fire suppression includes a pre-action dry pipe system in both facilities including VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus) along with over 600 smoke detectors. Security is also concern for vURL.net. The goal is to provide maximum redundancy in every facet of the datacenter environment to facilitate 100% uptime for the entire hosting infrastructure.

Network Infrastructure

vURL.net internal network architecture is a complete Cisco product and is a Cisco Certified Network. We utilize Cisco 7500 and 7200 routers as border routers, Cisco 6500 series switches in our distribution layer, Cisco 6500 and 5500 switches in our aggregation layers, and Cisco 3500 and 2900 series switches at the customer layer. Our network is fully meshed and redundant with 6 backbone providers. Our current network consists of ATT (OC3), UUNet (OC3), InterNap (2x100Mbps), Qwest (1Gbps), and Cogent Communications (5x100Mbps).

By connecting to multiple tier 1 backbones, the data can be distributed through many sources. This architectural design also means that the network connections are not dependent upon an single Internet backbone. Thus when problems occur, traffic rerouting is automatic, thereby ensuring the integrity of the network and continued access for our high-speed servers.

This takes the term “multi-homing” to a whole new level. Presently bandwidth utilization is 5% during peak traffic times. Therefore, the network is very flexible. If one of the backbone connections experiences problems, the traffic can simply be rerouted over other paths, thereby ensuring that users receive fast access times to sites hosted on our network.

In addition, the network runs Border Gate Protocol (BGP4). BGP is used at a provider with more than one access point to the Internet. It helps create a truly redundant network. In fact, in an ideal situation, a lease line failure should result in the BGP routing session to close on the bad leased line and the router on a working circuit should then begin to accept the additional traffic. In other words, traffic from a down circuit is redistributed across other circuits, thereby maintaining network integrity. Providers that are multi-homed and correctly setup can actually be more reliable than a single backbone provider because they have multiple paths to multiple providers.

Operating Systems

vURL.net shared hosting servers are powered by Debian Linux operating systems. Our specialists are always available to help you solve any operating system related issues. Shared hosting machines are with few custom kernel modifications optimized for web hosting. The multithreaded process pooling system of Debian Linux makes it the best platform for professional web sites.

Webservers

This is the core software after the OS, which makes available a website on the Internet. We use exclusively Apache the most flexible http daemon for professional websites. Our Apache servers are equipped with MOD_SSL and OPEN_SSL as well as PHP4 Interpreter for clients wanting to code PHP applications.

Data Bases

MySQL data base with enabled InnoDB and transactions support is available to all customers who request data base connectivity.

Scripting Engines

We have the PHP4 scripting engine installed for clients who wish to utilize the simple yet flexible PHP language. We also have Perl on all our machines for clients wishing to use Perl. Java based web service is an upcoming feature we will be proud to have.

Tech Support Team

Our tech support team consists of several certified professionals with strong experience in networking and system administration who work around the clock to provide technical assistance to our clients.