Facilities
Facilities
Site4u sells products and services of a high quality level. The most important criterion is reliability. In order to meet the quality requirements, Site4U carefully chooses its suppliers. Agreements with suppliers (service) are made regarding the products/services they deliver. For example, Site4U rents only racks in data centers with which agreements are made about quality, Internet access, redundancy, security, service, etc. When buying new equipment, a server must always be provided with a management card and a support contract.
Site4U offers various services, which remain strictly separated. Platforms that customers have access to are completely separate from Site4U’s own systems. For its customers, Site4U has separate platforms for:
- Shared Hosting Linux
- Business shared Hosting
- Mail hosting
- Virtualization (VMWare)
For all servers managed by Site4U, a backup procedure is performed daily.
Full backups are made monthly, differential backups are made weekly and incremental backups are made every day. Backups are stored via an internal network connection on backup equipment in a data center at 1 km distance from Bit-2. Between the two locations of Bit, Site4U uses an optical fiber connection.
All servers managed by Site4U are monitored for the following processes:
- Availability Server with Ping: 24 hours a day, notification via SMS and e-mail.
- Availability Database server: 24 hours a day, notification via SMS and e-mail.
- Diskspace: 24 hours a day e-mail notification, during office hours via SMS.
- Server Load: 24 hours a day notification via e-mail, during office hours via SMS.
- Other processes are monitored as specified by the customer.
All failures are automatically recorded by Site4U’s monitoring system. These data are available on request for inspection by the customer. Failures that directly affect the availability of the servers are reported to the customer as soon as possible.
Site4U guarantees an uptime of the server in its service agreement. Preventive maintenance is not included in the calculation of the availability. Examples of preventive maintenance are: moving the server and performing network maintenance. If down time is expected, preventive maintenance is scheduled outside office hours. Downtime is minimised.
Data center
Site4U rents racks in Ede (at BIT) and Amsterdam (at XS4All). Site4U uses the location BIT-2 in Ede as mail location. Characteristic of this location is that everything is done to guarantee safety and availability. The building is electronically and architecturally secured in accordance with escrow Class 4, the highest achievable standard for a normal business premises. Also, BIT ISO 27001 is certified, thus complying with the international standard for information security. All equipment (for fire detection, cooling, power, and the Internet) are of high quality and redundantly executed. All of the Site4U’s racks are equipped with security locks and a dual power supply for redundancy (A and B feed) and a static transfer switch, so that if a feed fails, it is switched to the other feed without downtime.
Site4U has made arrangements with its supplier BIT for solving malfunction that fall under the management of BIT.
• The response time is up to 1 hour in all cases. The response and repair times are counted from the moment Site4U reported the failure at BIT.
• For high priority incidents, BIT will solve the problem within four hours. The average repair time is 2 hours.
Network
Site4U takes its network connections via a redundant 10GB uplink. Our supplier is connected to the internet hub (AMS-IX) in Amsterdam through two geographically separated fiber connections with a maximum capacity of 160 GB. In addition, there is a direct connection to the German Internet node (DE-CIX) in Frankfurt. In the case of serious calamities in Amsterdam, Site4U will still able to continue to provide its customers with Internet connection. The internet connection is delivered to two redundant firewalls. Through these firewalls, the 10GB network is divided into segments in a simple and secure way. Various services from Site4U are kept separate from other services. There are also customers who have their own segment, in which they can meet their specific security requirements.
BIT guarantees an Internet access availability of 99.9% per year. The throughput rate is 100% guaranteed.
Behind the firewalls there are 10GB switches in several racks of Site4U. The entire VMWare platform communicates via the 10GB network. Everything is connected redundantly, so in the event of a failure of a switch, the traffic is handled via the other switch.
