The online hosting chain food
Unless you are calling yourself Google, Yahoo, Amazon or your company is financially backed by a too generous venture capitalist, like most of the businesses you rely on hosting and network service providers to run online services.
At AppShore, we host our online services on servers located in the USA. These servers are rented to a Hosting Service Provider or HSP. This provider itself rents some rack spaces in one or many data centers then installs and maintain its own servers. Data centers are connected to the Internet by network providers and telecommunication companies. I keep it simple but it is easily to see that more layers can be add up. Some of these companies can operate as a kind of virtual middle man, renting large amount of resources (network, rack space, servers, ..) then subletting for a higher price to smaller businesses. At the end between the user in front of his computer and AppShore, there are lot of technologies managed by many intermediates. Time to time, one of these will fail and the consequences are often immediate, no more access to the beloved AppShore service! At this stage, starts the race against time to find the point of failure and to request the right people along the hosting chain food to intervene. Generally the failures are detected, diagnosed and repaired in few minutes. Most of them are even not seen from the user side since backup equipments are automatically activated to insure continuity of service. Considering how heterogeneous and complex is the World Wide Web, it is quite reliable, efficient and, a welcome oddity amongst the large general public utility services, open to all providers no matter their size.
Posted Dec 23
by AppShore Inc.
