March 2013 saw iWeb record a 44 successive month with no network downtime, maintaining our position as the most reliable hosting in the world for more than three years. Don’t take our word for it – our uptime is independent measured each month by hosting performance analysts Netcraft.
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When considering where to locate your server, the best location will depend on the quality of the hosting providers available, their connection to the global communications network and the proximity to your target markets. You should also briefly consider the legal, political, environmental and exchange risks.
Here’s a comprehensive overview of server location factors, and some information to help you make the important decision about where to host your website.
We’re pleased to announce the deployment of the high-capacity, energy-efficient ADVA FSP 3000 optical transport solution throughout our high-speed Montréal network.
The ADVA FSP 3000 is the most efficient, reliable and scalable solution available and will help us scale our network while maintaining our promise of 100% uptime.
The internet is about people and hardware as well as the information sharing they facilitate. Among the infrastructure impacted by hurricane Sandy last week, the web felt the disruptive force of nature. It also helped people to tell the unusual story of what happens when a hurricane strays north.
Its easy to forget about the work that goes on behind the scenes of the internet. The people and the hardware that host, power and facilitate the medium. We tend to think about the words, images, videos and data, and even the people who create them, and less about the infrastructure they rely on.
This is more true than ever in the age of the cloud. To the end user, cloud hosting is not about paravirtualized drivers and hypervisors but data accessibility and simple interfaces. For cloud-based services, the model is an opportunity for brands and services that make access to data and media simple, reliable and a little bit fluffy.
The clouds making the headlines last week were more tangible. Indeed, they could be seen from space in satellite images published on weather and news websites charting the course of hurricane Sandy across the ocean to New York and New Jersey.
Sandy was bigger global news than many other hurricanes because it reached the north east of the United States. And the unprecedented demand for information this produced was met head-on, even fuelled by, an enormous variety of web reporting and footage. Continue reading »
The year 2010 has begun a few days ago and we’re already announcing a new data center with a 31,000 sq feet footprint, with a 20,000 servers capacity. This data center is located in the LaSalle neighborhood, in Montréal’s west, and we will be connected with 10GigE links to our other data centers. We will have now a capacity of 35,000 servers in 4 different strategic locations, which will be fed with 76Gbps Internet connectivity.
“The new center will be built to accomodate our automation needs, which is one of our 2010 priorities, said Cyrille Mertès, chief technical officer (CTO). Since it’s a new data center, we can plan from the beginning according to our current criterias and standards, with a minimum of technological compromise. ”
During the construction, we will communicate regularly with you with photos and videos of the work. We will also share the secrets of this adventure so that you can understand the technologies we will use to host your next servers at iWeb. Like the construction of our other 3 data centers, it will be done in several phases. The end of the phase 1, which will require a $3,000,000 investment, is planned for April 2010, and will welcome 3,000 servers.
As early as next week, we will begin to show you pictures of our data center! you can become a fan of iWeb on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for real-time information about building at iWeb-NE. You can already see exclusive pictures available on our Flickr and Facebook accounts.
As mentionned on our last post on the year 2009, we are ready for 2010; are you ready to enjoy it?
Official press release here
Choosing a good but affordable dedicated server can be a complicated and time-consuming task. But making the right decision will pay off in the long run.
Here’s the iWeb guide to choosing the right dedicated server, taking into account your technology, budget and business requirements.
Reputed firm Netcraft has officially published its ranking of the most reliable hosting companies for November 2008.
The iWeb network is in the top 8, specifically ranking third among the top hosting companies.
So far in 2008, several upgrades, updates and new carriers have been added to increase network performance and reliability – Congratulations to the network administration team for maintaining such a high quality of service for the IP network!!
There’s now 1 new uplink with Tiscali international Network. The service provider’s network covers the U.K., Europe, North America, and a few Asian countries.
This bring the total capacity of iWeb’s network at 43Gbps, up from the 42Gbps announced 2 weeks ago. iWeb is also planning to install in the near future 2 new 10Gbps Cogent links.
You can checkout the new network graphs at iWeb’s main website.
A new 10Gbps uplink with Tata Communications has been activated last week. Along with 2 new 10Gbps uplinks from Videotron Telecom, iWeb has now a total bandwidth capacity of 42Gbps, an increase of +180% compared to the announced bandwith capacity of 15Gbps in August! Here is the new list of providers:
The new uplinks means more capacity to handle large volume bandwidth requests, more reliability and redundancy for iWeb customers, both using the High Quality Network or the Redundant Unmetered services. You can checkout the network status graphs here.
In the new list, Tata Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Cogent and Level3 are international providers, with strong presence in North America, Europe (especially Deutsche Telekom) and Asia (especially Tata Communications). Videotron Telecom, Peer1, Tor1X and 3Men@Work on the other hand are Canadian/U.S. networks.
Before the end of the year, 2 new 10Gbps upllinks with Cogent, for the Unmetered network, and 1 new 1Gbps uplink with Tiscali, an Europe-based network, is also planned.
We are happy to announce that we will soon be completing our network expansion to upgrade our total network capacity to 15Gbps while adding three new carriers. The addition of these three new transit providers will mean better diversity, redundancy and reachability for all our customers and partners.
With these additional transit providers, iWeb will be directly linked to more networks which will result in connections being more direct and more efficient for all our customers. These additions will affect mostly the High Quality Network customers, but will also enhance incoming routes for our Redundant Unmetered Network customers; while also providing additional redundancy.
Which new carriers will be added to iWeb’s High Quality Network?
Unmetered Network upgrade:
Once all the upgrades will be completed, iWeb’s network will have a total network capacity of 15 Gbps dedicated to hosting services. The High-Quality Network and incoming routes will combine the networks of 7 carriers for a total of 11 Gbps, while the Redundant Unmetered Network (Cogent-based) now totals 4 Gbps. It is important to note that each part of iWeb’s network (High Quality and Unmetered) is configured to backup the other if necessary and that customers of both networks benefit from all available routes for incoming traffic. For a real-time overview of iWeb’s network usage, please have a look at the network usage page on our web site.
Here is complete list of our network composition:
iWeb’s first telecom link, back in 2000, was a whopping 100 Mbps link !!! In other words, our first link had less than 1% of the capacity we offer our to iWeb customers today. In the next few months, we also expect to upgrade our main transit providers to 10Gbps, stay tuned for more details!
Human beings always find a way to transform what’s not so cute in something beautiful, even when computer hardware is the subject. Not that Ethernet cables, switches , and other stuff on which the Internet is spreading are ugly, but no one would compare these with Van Gogh’s paintings. However, some persevering people saw an opportunity to release the artistic side of the machine.
It’s the case of Chris Harrison, student at Carnegie Mellon University, who had fun building graphical representations of usually intangible phenomenons. He has produced a map of interconnections between Wikipedia’s categories, a visualization of the bible, a graph showing global internet trends, and a world map of city-to-city internet connexions.
In this last case, Harrison used datas from the DIMES project in order to release a cute graphical representation on which we can see interconnections between cities of the world by router configurations (note that the internet still seem to be a Western thing) :
On the other side, Pingdom magazine regrouped some photographs of network cables arrangements made by techies with an artistic side :
At iWeb, we are not really cable artists, but we’re still organized…
Who said the web hosting industry was just rational and mathematical ?
iWeb has just received an award from Web Host Directory for its dedicated server services for the month of November 2007. This award was granted because iWeb “offers a high quality network, directly linked by BGP offering excellent performance for game servers, web servers and all applications that require high throughput and no loss of packets”. Web Host Directory also recalls that iWeb is one the few public webhosting companies, and that it “has proven to be a trusted company due to the loyalty of his customers”.
Web Host Directory is a site dedicated to the web hosting industry, aiming to present in a neutral way, different product offers available from hosting companies. It is not the first time iWeb has received this prize. You can obtain more details about this award on Web Host Directory’s website.
We have gathered, using traceroute, response times for many of the countries for whom we host servers. Of course geographic location within a country and other factors can affect the results, so this is meant only as an approximation of the response times you may encounter. We have compiled the data in the following graph:
The shortest response time is from the United States at 39.967 ms followed by Canada at 51.947ms (Yes Canada is THAT big). The longest response time is for Kyrgystan.
Wikipedia defines traceroute as “a computer network tool used to determine the route taken by packets across an IP network”. You can measure the response time of your server using our “looking glass” tool at the bottom of our network architecture page.
Starting this week, Google offers the possibility of choosing the geographical localization of your website through its webmasters tools service. This means that the search engine won’t be counting solely on the domain name extension (.com, .ca, .fr, .us), and on the IP address, to classify the website in its index. As Sébastien Billard explains, “a site with a “.fr” domain name was considered as French. Same thing for a site with a .com domain name but with an IP located in France.”
It was a problem for sites such as 2803, which is hosted at iWeb in Canada, but with a .com extension while its author is French. As he explains, “Google globalizies the web hosting market and simplifies the host’s tasks which had before to rent IP addresses located in all the country of their customers“. This is a great news for all the hosting companies of this world which will now be able to demonstrate even more efficiently that internet’s frontiers are so relatives.
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We are proud to announce the conclusion of the second expansion phase at iWeb’s-CL data center, in Saint-Leonard. Even if there are small adjustments and some cleaning to do, the center is completely operational and works at its full capacity. The construction of this second expansion phase debuted last September.
The data center’s capacity increased to 4000 dedicated servers and it now provides enough redundant power to fill 135 colocation racks. Also, a Network Operation Center (NOC) has been built in order to manage and monitor network activities more efficiently.
But iWeb won’t stop there : the third phase should begin shortly in order to increase even more the capacity of our data center. The goal is to cope with the increased requests from clients for our first-quality hosting plans.
Here is an interesting summary of all the different steps of this second phase :
September 2006 | March 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007
Finally, here are some images about these steps :
| Zone1: Dedicated servers section | |
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| Zone2: Colocation Section | |
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| Zone3: Electrical room | |
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| Zone5: NOC zone | |
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| Zone6: New section | |
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We are proud to announce the addition of another GigE network connection to Videotron in our iWeb-CL data center. iWeb’s network now offers a 9Gbps capacity, with 3Gbps from Videotron. iWeb’s High Quality Network and iWeb’s Unmetered Network provide customers with a high level of redundancy and reliability at an unbeatable price.
Soon, we plan to add in our iWeb-CL datacenter a additional GigE network connection to Teleglobe and another GigE network connection to Cogent for our iWeb?s Unmetered Network for a total capacity of 11Gbps. We will keep you up-to-date with the details.
We suggest you visit the Network Architecture page on our site for more information.
iWeb is proud to rank at the top of Netcraft’s Top 10 most reliable networks for March 2007. iWeb shares March’s “Most Reliable” award with three other Web Hosting providers. This is the second time iWeb tops the ranking, the fourth time in the past few months that iWeb’s network is listed as one of the 10 most reliable networks among several world class web hosters! You can read Netcraft’s full article at News Netcraft.
The Netcraft analysis is made by measuring, every 15 minutes from several different access points, the accessibility to the main Web site (in our case iWeb8.Com) of the listed Web hosters. Please note that the web hosting companies located in the United States are privileged in the classification over other hosters in the world because most of the servers that collect the data are located in the United States.
By default the hosters sites are ranked in order of failed requests and time to connect, but other criteria can also be considered. Once the analysis is made, Netcraft makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers’ sites of this ranking, which iWeb is part of.
More information on the measurement process and the last 15 minutes measurements are available at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters
Already 3 weeks since our last update concerning our second phase of our iWeb-CL Datacenter Expansion. Several elements were set up and we approach the moment where we can install servers in this new section.
Here is a plan of our iWeb-CL data center. Each section has a number that matches the different pictures to demonstrate the work in progress.
| Zone1: Dedicated Servers Section |  |
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| In phase 1 of the dedicated server zone, a new row of shelves was added following 4 rows already in place, to be able to host more servers in this phase before the end of phase 2. At the moment, the work on the suspended floor is almost complete and the new rows of shelves will soon be added to it. | ||
| Zone2: Colocation Section |  |
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| In the colocation zone, a second air conditioning unit was added. This one is functional at the moment and contributes largely to maintain cool and constant temperature. A working space is also in development for colocation customers who can settle down there to work on their server 24/24. Working desks will be installed there soon. | ||
| Zone3: Electrical Room |  |
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| In the electric room, a new 500kvA UPS unit was added next to the 300kvA already in place. The third 500kvA UPS was delivered and the installation should be completed in the coming weeks. Furthermore, a steel structure was set up to be used as a mezzanine which will support several transformers and filters to assure stability of our electric architecture. | ||
| Zone5: NOC Zone |  |
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| The new NOC is in good progress. The network/system administrators desks have been installed there although some elements remain to be finalized, several employees already work in this space. Furthermore, a dining room has been made available to them. | ||
| Zone6: New Section |  |
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| As for the new building section, the electric cables outside the building were installed and covered up. The stucture of the new section which shelters among others, the water towers which will supply the air conditioning units, has been built. | ||
New pictures will be published this week to keep you up to date with the last developments.
iWeb is proud to rank at the top of Netcraft’s Top 10 most reliable networks for January 2007. Three Web Hosting providers share the “Most Reliable” award for January. This is the third time in the past few months that iWeb’s network is listed as one of the 10 most reliable networks among several world class web hosters! You can read Netcraft’s full article at News Netcraft.
The Netcraft analysis is made by measuring, every 15 minutes from several different access points, the accessibility to the main Web site (in our case iWeb8.Com) of the listed Web hosters. Please note that the web hosting companies located in the United States are privileged in the classification over other hosters in the world because most of the servers that collect the data are located in the United States.
By default the hosters sites are ranked in order of failed requests and time to connect, but other criteria can also be considered. Once the analysis is made, Netcraft makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers? sites of this ranking, which iWeb is part of.
More information on the measurement process and the last 15 minutes measurements are available at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters
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