The Web Hosting Environment

Strategic Business Solutions International, LLC maintains an advanced technology web hosting environment for our customers.  This environment consists of facilities, hardware, and services that together form a fast, secure, and reliable arena in which our customers can communicate with their staffs and the public.

Facilities:
The hosting facility for the public is located in California and maintained by one of the largest hosting companies in the world.  This provides customers with physical security, virtual security, redundant data backup, and redundancy of servers as well as around the clock monitoring of the systems.

SBSI also has mirrored servers located in our office facility that are identically configured and maintained as the public servers in California.  These servers are where production and staging takes places.  It also allows SBSI customers to see any changes that are being made to their website before it is actually posted to the public because they have access to our development servers.

Hardware:

• SBSI uses web servers made by Dell Corporation.  Each server is configured with dual 1.4 MHZ processors, 1 GB RAM, and RAID-5 stacks of hard drives that provide plenty of power and storage for our customers.  ULTRAwide SCSI contollers, and 100 Mbit/sec NIC cards connect to multiple, redundant backbones with automatic routing and each public servers is backed up daily.

Services:

• 150MB of Disk Space
• 1 mySQL database (note: additional databases may be included in Client’s basic service in those cases where SBSI also provides web development & maintenance services)
• 5 GB of bandwidth per month
• Hosted on high-performance servers with the latest version of PIII processors.
• LINUX operating system
• Apache web server
• Perl 5 interpreter
• PHP4 server scripting
• FTP access
• Daily backup to tape every night (incremental backup every night, and full backups once per week) to a centralized high-speed storage system
• 24/7 System Monitoring of the Server on a 1 minute basis on standard ports. In addition, SBSI provides application monitoring - SBSI checks to not only make sure SBSI servers are working but that pages can actually be posted to the internet.
• Server location has extensive fire suppression systems.

Hosting facility has multiple-generator power to protect against localized power outages and insure the highest levels of uptime. SBSI’s hosting facility also draws power from multiple power grids.   

The SBSI staff updates sites on the development servers.  Customers are allowed access to their webspace and may make suggestions and give approval for work being done.  When the work is complete, it is posted to the staging servers, which mirror the public servers.  Finally, the work is posted to the public servers.  Our system also allows the Customer to manage their own content through a process of editing and creating new pages.  When this happens, the content is changed on the public servers and then with a program called Web Sync we download the changes to our internal servers.  The program verifies the digital signature of the Customer and compares access permissions.  If the signature and permissions are correct the program does the download.  If the signature and permissions are not correct, Web Sync replaces the content with the last verified content page.  These two processes, multiple servers and Web Sync, keep the latest data available on each of the servers.