Our Network
Unlike many other hosting providers who rent their hardware on a monthly basis, we own all of our hardware.
Datacenter
For the ultimate in reliability, we house our servers at two data centers located 25 miles apart. Our systems are designed to be "lights out" and 95% of maintenance can be done remotely. Over 30 critical points for each server are monitored 24/7/365. Rest assured, we usually know about an issue before it becomes critical.
Datacenter 1
Location: Garden City, New YorkProvider: Level(3)
Datacenter 2
Location: New York, New YorkProvider: NYI
Network
Each data center uses Tier 1 bandwidth (no Cogent) with uplinks to Level3, Abovenet, Sprint and Internap. We have a public and private network for better separation of traffic and security.Private Network Details
- Separate VLAN for security
- Network is used for DNS resolving, monitoring, remote MySQL, and backups
- VPN route for private network between data centers
Servers
All servers are custom built by Empowering Media and 100% owned by us. The computers used are data-center grade SuperMicro servers. No desktop computers are used here! All servers have the minimum configuration listed below. We have onsite spare equipment for rapid repairs.
- Processor - Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz and HyperThreading Technology
- Memory - 2 GB DDR ECC
- Hard Drives - 2 x 250 GB SATA - 7,200 RPM (hot swapable)
- RAID Level - 1 (hardware based)
Software
Server software is tweaked to ensure the maximum performance and the ultimate in reliablity.
- Operating System - CentOS 3.8 Linux using the 2.4 kernel (customized by Empowering Media's Engineering Team)
- Server Software - Apache 1.3
- Control Panel - DirectAdmin (customized by Empowering Media)
- Programming Languages - PHP, Perl, Java Servlets, Ruby on Rails
- Email - Exim, ClamAV, local DNS of RBLs and SpamAssassin with many customizations
- Databases - MySQL 4.1
- System Monitoring - Nagios and Cacti with custom plugins monitoring over 30 data points per server