Corese European Hosting Services

Hardware Background

We learned the hard way that only quality enterprise hardware makes quality and stable background whether it is for regular hosting or web applications.

Nowadays, we use only reliable enterprise hardware with hot-swappable (i.e. replaceable during operation) parts that make it capable of running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and all year long without serious issues or unnecessary down-times.

While others may choose cheap non-raid S-ATA storage devices that were never meant for real 24/7/365 enterprise solutions, we rely on rack mount servers with fast SAS/S-ATA Raid Edition hard drives in RAID configurations. If you check pricing on these drives, you will clearly see why we will never offer so called “unlimited space” for five bucks a month as it is quite common these days.

Note:
RAID technology is basically a way how to join multiple individual hard drives together, create an array and make it fail-proof, faster or both.

While there are many RAID configurations we mostly use Raid 6 (a hard drive array that is able to operate with up to 2 failed hard drives) or Raid 10 configurations depending on the purpose of individual servers.

Quality hard drives and their configurations are as much important as quality RAID controllers. We use only proven series equipped with a backup battery with excellent CPU and cache memory performance.

Furthermore, most servers are equipped with very expensive redundant mirrored memory modules that make it possible to run even in case of a whole memory module failure.

Network

Our servers for web hosting are currently located in two independent datacenters in the Netherlands. For specialty application hosting, remote backups and DNS hosting we utilize also datacenters in Germany and United Kingdom.

We chose Dutch datacenters for web hosting mainly because local connection providers belong to one of the most reliable in the Europe especially if we consider geographical location.

The backbone of all datacenters used is configured to be completely failsafe, therefore if one of the connection providers experience outages or technical difficulties, the data flow is automatically redirected to another one in order to provide persistent connection.

Utilizing BGP-4 protocol that automatically selects the best available connection, our servers are directly connected to the following networks:

Leaseweb (Amsterdam) – servers running Cpanel

Note: The connection capacity is only orientational.

Alphen a/d Rijn (Alphen DC) – other servers/services

Both networks offer great performance, but for shared and reseller hosting we chose the Leaseweb Datacenter. Therefore if you sign up for our services, your account will be placed within that datacenter.

To test the network availability to your place, use the following addresses:

For Leaseweb Datacenter (shared and reseller accounts):

ping 212.7.198.193

tracert 212.7.198.193

Security and Backup

No matter what precautions you take, there is always a small chance, that something bad happens and data get lost due to a hardware failure. While we do maximum to prevent anything like this to happen, we also put the accent on backup solutions, because situations we cannot affect may always occur (natural disasters, accidental deletion, large hadron collider going wild etc.).

Therefore, we utilize multi-layered backup on a daily basis mirrored to two geographically different locations (two different countries to be precise). From there, all backups are replicated on a weekly basis to a completely different off site location where the storage is fully encrypted with dual cipher encryption algorithm for maximum security. The final layer of backup includes storing the full backups to DLT tapes with three months minimum recycling period (please note that this last layer applies only to our VPS and dedicated servers).