Network Specifications

There's a reason why we consistently achieve 100% uptime annually! Find out what makes our network superior to our competition.

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The network operations center (NOC) of GayWebHosts.com features raised flooring. This enables a constant flow of conditioned air and helps to maintain uniform room temperature at all times. In addition, raised flooring reduces static and ensures a professional, computer grade environment for our servers.

The facility is equipped with a Raytheon fire suppression system, designed to immediately extinguish fire and protect equipment and personnel. The command center is controlled via automatic doors to further secure and protect the equipment.

Finally, the NOC is located in a secure, monitored, class A building with a minimum number of approved personnel allowed access to highly sensitive areas and equipment. A detailed record of employee and visitor entry is maintained at all times.

Uninterruptible Power System
To guard against local power failures, we have two industrial-grade, three phase Liebert UPS systems. These act as back-up batteries, maintaining uninterrupted power in case of surges or power outages. With these backup systems in place, we can keep our network up and running indefinitely without relying on external power.

Industrial-Grade Air Conditioners
The NOC has two Liebert ten ton industrial air conditioners, which condition our computer rooms and operations center. Our computer room is kept at an optimal temperature of 65 degrees fahrenheit.

Custom Web Servers
The web servers are custom-built industrial machines designed for a 24/7 web serving environment. All servers are equipped with dual redundant 450-watt power supplies, hot swap Seagate Baracuda/Cheetah drives and force-filtered cooling systems. In addition, the NOC is equipped with an inventory of identically configured, burned-in standby servers.

Force-Filtered Server Cooling
All of the custom web servers are equipped with a positive pressure filtered-air system. Four large fans pull filtered air into each server's protective case and the components within are cooled by fans which circulate this purified air. This constant introduction of clean air into the case creates a positive pressure environment ensuring dust and particles remain outside of the server.

Hot Swap Seagate Drives
The drives and drive bays of all the servers are constructed from high-grade aluminum, and rest in shock mounted drive cages, which adds to the durability of the hardware. The drives proudly feature the lowest failure rate in the industry.

In the event of a server failure, these swappable drives can be pulled and immediately installed in a standby server enabling your site to be back up and running within moments.

Redundant Hot Swap Power Supplies
Each server employs dual-redundant hot swap power supplies. If a power supply were to fail, the server would continue running with power from the alternate supply. Meanwhile, alarms would alert a technician, who would quickly restore redundancy. In the meantime, servers and client sites would experience no downtime.

Directly Connected to Three Internet Backbones
The NOC, located in Baltimore, Maryland, is fed by GlobalCenter (GC), Qwest Communications and GTE through three separate bandwidth-on-demand connections which enter Baltimore in our building. We are directly connected to the Internet through these services, so there is no T1 or other intermediate service to go wrong--ever!

GC, a Tier 1 provider whose 13,000-mile fiber optic network and Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology provide an enormous 460 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of capacity worldwide, has an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) fiber node located just a few floors below the NOC.

Qwest comes into Baltimore with an OC-48 line. They also have an ATM fiber node floors below the NOC. The Qwest connection enables us to offer additional redundancy and better routes to Europe, Latin America and Asia. With our carriers, our router has up to 150,000 possible routes to send each packet of traffic.

Genuity, a division of GTE, is the third Tier One Internet backbone. Genuity provides excellent network performance as a result of their high-speed peering arrangements with other Tier One Internet backbone providers. The GTE global network delivers customers directly onto the Internet via a high-speed connection to its private, super-capacity backbone, including 17,000 miles of fiber and OC192 capacity. It is comprised of more than 800 U.S. local access points and approximately 1,500 international local access points in more than 150 countries.

Network Redundancy
The NOC uses intelligent end-user routing software called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), between Qwest, GC and GTE, who use the same protocol. BGP identifies which path is the most efficient for each data packet and then routes the packet to its destination on the fastest path. This increases the speed at which web pages sent from our NOC arrive at their destination.

Studies have shown that the most common reason for downtime is circuit failure on Tier 1 provider backbones, the major data highways. To guard against this potential problem, we have three Tier-1 providers. If one experiences problems, we can route traffic down the other one. Furthermore, because we are OnNet with GlobalCenter, Qwest and GTE, we share their digital distribution architecture, which includes private peering network connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, EUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, @Home, IBM Advantis and others. These private peering arrangements allow our NOC to exchange packets of data with every major backbone carrier in a one-to-one environment quickly and efficiently.

In addition, GC has high-speed links to eight public exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS. Through these public exchanges, visitors have the ability to reach your site, no matter where they are coming from on the Internet.

Network Reliability
Industry analysis reveals that 70% of downtime over ten hours with any ISP is caused by telephone circuit failure. Since our NOC is in the same building as Global Center, Qwest and GTE, circuit failure is virtually eliminated because there is no phone circuit between us and our providers. Instead, there is a direct connection between our Cisco 7500 routers and theirs. The providers also have peering connections with other major Tier 1 providers, which allows traffic to be switched to alternate backbones should the need arise.

Raw Performance Equals Low Latency/High Throughput
Too often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity. As a result, their corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms. Our NOC's network daily average is 27% of its capacity, with midday peak spikes reaching only 33% capacity. Our NOC guarantees clients will be carried off our network in less than 80ms over a five minute average at any time of day or night.

NOC Security
The NOC provides a full range of security services to insure the safety and integrity of mission critical data. As more businesses harness the power of the web, reliable and secure public communication is an ever increasing need. We stand at the forefront of providing clients with secure communication solutions.

Firewalls
A firewall is a security device that secures the server from possible attacks and is placed between the server and the Internet to moderate and document requests for data access according to a predefined set of security policies. Every server comes equipped with a firewall, which is built and managed by the NOC security engineers. Our NOC staff is managed by a network security engineer with over fifteen years of experience in telecommunications cryptography. In addition to the individual firewall, our entire network is secured through a circuit level firewall, providing one more level of security for mission critical data.

Security Monitoring
To ensure the integrity of our customers' web sites, we proactively monitor system processes on each server as well as across our entire network. These monitoring programs are designed to halt and report all intrusions to the system and provide our customers with the peace of mind they need to conduct secure business transactions from our servers.

NOC Automation
GayWebHosts.Com operates scripts that ping the servers every few minutes to make sure that each server is accessible from within and outside our network. If the server cannot be pinged, the script sends an e-mail and pages our system engineers immediately for rapid correction.

Automated Web Server Monitoring
Our tools monitor the Apache web server to ensure that it is up and serving pages. Every two minutes, we send a test page to the http daemon. If it does not respond, our script will reload the daemon. Then two minutes later it will send a test page again. If there is still no response, then the reload/test scenario repeats itself. After two attempts, a technician is contacted to take the remedial steps needed to make sure that servers are fully operational.

Automated Memory Monitoring
This monitor makes sure that no process takes up more than a certain percentage of your available memory. If a process consumes more than the maximum allotment, it is temporarily killed off and the situation is reported to the NOC staff.

Automated Port Monitoring
The NOC actively monitors all commonly used ports to make sure that they are open, and to verify that they are actually passing data. The script does this by requesting data. If the port does not respond, it is restarted by the monitoring tool.

Automated External Monitoring & Server Control
All of the servers and the network are monitored externally. In addition to the internal scripts described above, we use off-network servers to provide corrective action, notification and coverage for maximum protection of service delivery. Using these off-site machines gives us the ultimate guarantee that we can provide the uptime and reliability promised to our clients.

Automated Backups
The NOC provides automated daily backups on all servers: a daily incremental back up and a weekly full backup. The full backups are placed onto tapes and are stored for two weeks while the incremental backups are stored onto disk and kept until the next full backup is performed.

"Reliability Under Real-World Disaster Situations"
Find out how our network has weathered hurricanes, dos attacks, the east-coast power outages and other emergencies with flying colors!