iWeb Communities: Blog

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

MONTREAL (September 22, 2009) — iWeb announced today the availability of R1Soft Data Protection plans, an essential backup and disaster recovery service for its dedicated server clients.

Using R1Soft’s high-performance Continuous Data Protection® (CDP) technology, the new service allows bare-metal restore of dedicated servers for disaster recovery and business continuity. Customers can restore backed-up files and systems on a new server after a hardware failure, with file-level granularity. Backup and restoration management is done with an easy-to-use web-based interface.

The new service, powered by R1Soft’s advanced Continuous Data Protection® (CDP), offers iWeb clients near-continuous, disk backups with minimal server performance impact.  After a thorough evaluation process, iWeb selected R1Soft CDP because of its unique disaster recovery capabilities. In the event of system failure, the solution allows iWeb users to bare-metal restore their servers which minimizes downtime and maximizes business continuity.

iWeb’s new R1Soft Data Protection Plans offers diverse backup storage space from 10GB, starting at just $15/month, for Linux and Windows dedicated servers.

“Having a solid backup solution is key to deliver customer satisfaction in web hosting. With R1Soft CDP, we can offer our clients an enterprise-level backup service with a low-priced entry point,” said Martin Leclair, President of Products and Technologies at iWeb.  “Our flexible and on-demand plans give new and existing customers affordable options for data protection and have peace of mind knowing that their data is safe.”

With iWeb’s robust infrastructure and R1Soft’s reliable data protection software, customers now have the resources and backup tools for an even higher level of data availability. R1Soft’s high-performance CDP solution will protect their mission-critical servers with incremental backups around the clock, and bare-metal restores to quickly restore their data in the event of a disaster, hardware failure, or accidental deletion” said David Wartell, vice president of R1Soft, a division of BBS Technologies, Inc.

iWeb also offers Dedicated R1Soft Backup Servers for customers looking to backup more data.  The powerful, all-in-one solution boasts up to 4TB backup space, 25 client server licenses, and provides the ability to secure backups for multiple servers.

For more information on iWeb’s R1Soft Data Protection Plans please visit:

http://iweb.com/managed-hosting/backup-storage/

About iWeb
iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine. For more information, please consult the Company’s website: http://about.iweb.com

For the past 10 weeks, the iWeb development and IT team have been working on integrating R1Soft’s “Continuous Data Protection” (CDP) solution and make it available as a flexible and add-on service for all dedicated server customers.

Dedicated servers can now be provisioned with a R1Soft data protection plan, with storage space from 10GB to 500GB, from as low as $15 per month. With a R1soft data protection plan, a backup agent will be installed, and starting regular scheduled backups, saving the server’s entire filesystem to iWeb’s fully-redundant, RAID-50 storage servers.

For customers looking to backup more than 500GB and/or to backup more than one server, dedicated backup servers are still available.

The main advantage of this new backup service is its continuous feature. While it might take a minimal time to finish the first backup, next backups will take significantly less time, since only incremental differences are sent to main storage servers. It also allows you to do bare-metal restores, which is restoring a system to a brand-new hard drive. iWeb also provides a management interface, accessible through the customer hub, allowing you to choose a scheduling time, choose files to restore, and set email notifications for successful or failed backup operations.

All in all, it’s a significant improvement compared to the previous solution used by iWeb. Customers get more control with the backup management interface. It’s also more flexible, since you can change the backup storage space in the customer hub.

This is a recommended solution for any server, to backup important data, and being able to recover from disasters. One never knows when there will be a filesystem crash, a hardware failure, or an attack by a hacker or botnets.

The service is available in the order process, in the software configuration section, for any new dedicated server order (except Mac Os or FreeBSD). For existing servers, you can add it through the customer hub. Installation (and peace of mind!) takes less than 24 hours. Also bear in mind that all the hard drive is backed up with this new service, so be sure to order a storage space bigger than the space you are using.

Add a R1Soft Data protection plan to an existing server
View our new R1Soft backup solution page.

As our followers on Twitter already know, we have unveiled a special promotion this month, with a total of 8 deals. Compared to our already very attractive offerings, we’ve added much-needed extras like additional bandwidth, RAM, better hard drives, or even an additional server.

• Budget Dedicated Server Deal: 3000GB bandwidth and 2GB of RAM, instead of the usual offer of 1500GB and 1GB of RAM, at an always low price of $69/mo
• Windows Dedicated Server Deal: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB of RAM and 500GB Hard Drive, instead of 1500GB bandwidth, 1GB RAM and 160GB Hard Drive. Only $124/mo
• Dedicated Server + cPanel: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB RAM, 320GB Hard drive. That’s double the normal offer, only at $99/mo
• Mac Server Deal: Get Unlimited Bandwidth for only $119/mo
• Unmetered Server Deal: 20Mbps Unmetered Traffic for only $149/mo, from the usual offer of 10Mbps
• Plesk deal: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB RAM + Free Plesk. Get it at $99/mo
• Cluster deal: iWeb gives you a FREE database server, added to the web cluster offer, for the same price.
• Power Server Deal: A Core2Quad with 10.000GB bandwidth, 4GB RAM, at $159/mo. Compare to the normal 2000GB offer and 2GB RAM.

By shopping those deals, you save from $30 (cost of RAM, HD) to $200 (cost of bandwidth) per month on your order.

This means either you’re developing on Windows, Linux, if you prefer cPanel or Plesk, there’s always a deal for you.

Our IT team is obsessed with redundancy and providing a 100% network and power SLA, as shown here. One thinks and brainstorms about clusters, automated failover, redundant software and hardware that would make sure that there is no single point of failure. One recent example is the recursive DNS servers, which is now served by 2 geographically balanced fail-over cluster. Others worry about natural disasters, thunderstorms, fires, denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, etc.

For iWeb, we’ve been through all of those incidents. We had an incident yesterday though, which was a fiber cable cut.

This kind of incident is frequent, with the IT team drilled and prepared to face cuts, with traffic rerouted to one of the multiple other providers. The cause though was a very rare occurrence; which was in this case due to a squirrel which chewed the cable.

I have to admit squirrels weren’t forethought in the redundancy plan. We’re currently looking for the culprit, thus the poster… In all seriousness though, this incident proves that even if you spend weeks and months planning for 100% availability and 100% scalability, and doing functional and integration tests, nothing beats doing it for good to see how it performs in the real world … and to be ready for the squirrel!

Netcraft, a firm which measures reliability, uptime and network performance,  has ranked iWeb.com as one of the most reliable web hosting company site in June 2009.

The reliability performance is monitored every 15 minutes, from different reference points. Netcraft’s measurements will allow you to evaluate reliability of data transfer.

The iWeb network is in the top 10, specifically ranking fourth among the top hosting companies.This is the 10th time we’re ranked in the top 10, as you can see in iWeb’s track record.

If you have been shopping for a dedicated server recently, you might have seen our unique offers on bandwidth or dedicated servers with free upgrades.

This time, we are doing something radically different: we’ll post online everyday a new special offer. The deals will range from unbeatable prices (for instance, a dedicated server at only $29 per month) to servers packed with 10TB bandwidth, or new packages to discover.

Compared to previous campaigns, there will be a new offer everyday at noon, EST. Since there are only 10 servers available, be sure to check the promotion page at noon to get yours. Yesterday, we had $29/mo servers, and after a few hours, there was only 1 left.

Since everyone is also on Twitter these days, we are also putting a special promotion made for Twitter users. Click on the Twitter area, update your status, and we will give you a 2nd month FREE. It’s a sweet deal, again, an exclusive for twitter which we awarded to our first lucky customers yesterday (@eviluncleedd @PhilDes, @starhosting amongst others)

Now, get ready for the race, and good luck!