Hosting - Advanced
Earthgrid's global hosting infrastructure is designed to operate as a robust, secure and highly scalable environment. To achieve this, Earthgrid is fully integrated with a Content Delivery Network (CDN), based on the RDAM specification (see below). The Content Delivery Network spans over four independent data centers, set in different geographic locations thus accelerating the content delivery from any part of the world. Each data center is located in a state-of-the-art facility equipped with terabytes of storage arrays, gigabit connectivity to tier1 providers, fire suppression and power backups. By applying regular software updates and off-site backups our servers are always secure and highly reliable.
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To offer the best possible user experience, our CDN is locality-sensitive - i.e. it will always serve the content from the data center nearest to the user. The network's peak utilization is automatically monitored not to exceed 80% from the capacity, thus ensuring fast loading time for all users. As Earthgrid's popularity increases and user base expands, we perform regular capacity upgrades of our data centers to meet the growing demand with the same top performance. Earthgrid's global hosting infrastructure is proactively monitored 24/7 by our NOC, ensuring optimal performance in any condition.
RDAM Details: an infrastructural platform, combining high speed, high throughput and high scalability with very low total cost of ownership. In order to ensure real-time load and locality balancing, RDAM parses the HTML before sending it to the client and replaces the URLs of all digital assets (images, downloadable files, etc.) with URLs of the same assets in the data center nearest to the IP requesting the content. This process is fully transparent for the application that creates the content, and it takes about 2ms for a 200Kb HTML page with 200 digital assets. The product is heavily used in Earthgrid Sites, allowing it to handle high volume of users without the need of significant resource investments. You can take advantage of RDAM without installing it on your servers by using our high-availability hosting.
With our website builder you create your site online, directly on the web storage space allocated for your account. The content management system takes care to distribute the resources you add on your site along the servers of our hosting infrastructure and assure high availability for your site at all times. In other words, the web hosting service is fully automated and an integral part of your website account. You don't need to look for providers, choose from complex hosting plans, deal with technical setup, take care of backups or worry about the availability of your site at peak traffic periods. Your website is already hosted.
Integrated hosting also means that you can't use your website account space for a general-purpose hosting space. You won't be able to upload a ready site you have, without using our designs and content management tools.
How reliable is my website hosting? Is my website content backed up?
Your site runs on a global scalable server infrastructure located in several secure data-centers for high-availability, with gigabit connectivity to tier1 providers, robust load-balancing mechanism, redundant storage and automated backup and monitoring system. We do daily off-site backups of your site.
Can I make a website with you and host it on a different server?
No. We offer a complex publishing framework in which site building tools and hosting are integrated as one service. You may export a static version of your site using any 
download manager and host it on any other server, but you won't be able to edit the site with our content management tools there.
A Bit of History - How We got into the Hosting Business
For over a decade, Earthgrid has run its core operations (now earthgrid.org and earthgrid.net) on what is called a 'dedicated server' in a 'co-located facility' - this means that it is a computer in an air-conditioned room on a very fast network but our project is the only project on that computer. It is maintained and managed and we pay a monthly fee to maintain service. On average we maintained 10-20 core clients' sites on this single server in addition to our own services.
What we learned is that anytime you run software that runs a database and do your own custom programming, you need to have a dedicated server. This is why we still maintain dedicated servers to be able to run PHP, PERL, JAVA or any other programming system and integrate it seamlessly with the Earthgrid sites product.
In this manner we can balance the traffic load so that the bulk of the traffic sees the 'front door' as your site that you can manage and edit your own site. Then to that we can hook-up a database system to one of our dedicated servers to manage your customer list in MYSQL or SQL Server. Describe your project if you need this service. Recently, we added an additional co-location facility to manage a dedicated Sun Solaris server for a search-engine project we are developing. Over the years, we have also tried-out the various other hosting options listed below in this table, so the information you see here is based on our actual experience.
The Various Types of Hosting Available For Your Site
No matter how you design your web site or who does it for you, you need a place to host it. A 'host' is a service company that keeps the site running 24/7 with the most reliable uptime. It is the back-bone of your business. If your web-site is not reachable by the world visitors will be denied access (unknown to you). The more you pay normally, the higher your 'uptime' values will be, and they will be 'up' from any location in the world: you get what you pay for. Here's the breakdown:
| Type of Service | Cost | Pro's | Con's |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Price per gigabyte transferred usually with minimum averaging around $10,000/mo | Distributed Resources, Fast, Completely Managed. | If your web site suddently gets popular, your costs will shoot through the roof. You have to carefully manage and monitor your traffic and make sure you have enough advertising revenue to cover your costs. Often times you're served on the same systems as large video networks including television stations, so you are much more subject to 'peak use' and your bandwith may be slow. |
| Co-Location | $2400-$8000/year + set-up fees depending on # of servers in array | Fast, Reliable, Dedicated to your Project | Server Maintenance not Managed, Single Location is subject to Network Traffic, Requires Network Administrator (staff person) to oversee operations (extra labor costs) |
| Premium Shared Hosting | $240-500/year | Reliable | Single Location issue (as above), you are sharing resources with usually 10-100 or more unknown other business 'sharing' your server with you and also 'sharing' your bandwidth. |
| Economy Hosting | $60-$100/year | Unreliable | Single Location issue, however you are sharing resources with 1000's of other business on the single server. Your site is one of millions in a server farm and is extremely vulnerable to network traffic. |
Our Solution Saves Time and Money
- Multiple locations serve your content through a Global Distributed Network.
- Not Subject to Network Traffic (the system automatically chooses the closest server)
- Managed Services (our network partner's staff manages the network 24/7 for everyone on the network)
- All the benefits of being on a complete CDN - because it is!
- Cost savings : we do NOT charge for bandwidth
- We give you up to 1 Gigabyte of Storage Space on the CDN - enough to host Flash, Video Clips and all your heavy website content.
- Additional space is also available at a flat monthly fee.
- Includes License to use our Stock Imagery and Hundreds of Templates for your site.
- Includes License to use our Web-Based Dynamic Site Editor
- Update and change the content of your site 24/7 from any location anywhere in the world from any computer.
- No set-up or hidden fees
- Fast, Reliable, 24/7 UpTime
- Web-Based Management, Traffic and Statistics Tools
- Complete E-mail Broadcast capability and managed mailing lists (save $80-$200/mo on e-mail services)
The last point to us was really the big one. One of our clients was paying $79/mo to manage and maintain his mailing list for newsletters. By switching him to the Earthgrid solution. he is paying less than 1/2 of what he was paying just to maintain his e-mail list!
Contact Us today for a free consultation and we can show you how to save time and money by eliminating a lot of the services you don't need and applying solutions that will help you grow your business.
Bottom line: you get a CDN service for a Premium Shared Hosting price.
Our solution can only be achieved by having every object in the system be 'stored' as a virtual container and tagged as such. As you are visually editing or creating your site what you are actually dong is organizing your 'objects' of stored data such as Text/Images, video, audio, photographs, etc. with 'Structure' . Your data itself is stored in several places all at once and is 'pulled' from the network. Because of this our sites are always up, always reliable and can be reached from anywhere in the world.
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