Below is a partial list of value-added services, that a customer may choose to bundle into an integrated service. The pricing structure for these additional features is highly competitive and the benefits can be enormous. Please contact the HostVentures sales team to discuss any additional services that may be in interest to your business.

High-Availability Features

Local Server Load-Balancing (LSLB)

Managed redundant local Load-Balancing enables the sharing of Internet traffic among a group of servers in the same physical location. The immediate benefits of LSLB are endless:

• Intelligent traffic distribution among the servers in the cluster
• High performance and throughput
• Redundancy and high-availability
• Scalability and flexibility

HostVentures Load-Balancing solutions are based on industry standard Cisco Systems, Inc technology. To ensure the uptime and reduce a single-point of failure, all LSLB installations are performed using a redundant pair of LSLB devices in a failover configuration.

Global Server Load-Balancing (GSLB)

Often confused with a primitive DNS round-robin balancing, HostVentures managed redundant GSLB solutions are hardware based with a sophisticated level of interaction with locally installed LSLB devices. This next-generation, global traffic distribution technology delivers unprecedented levels of service quality with consideration for customer proximity, network conditions and local LSLB site performance metrics.

Content caching & distribution

Customers serving a great amount of static content (i.e. images, movies of infrequently changed web pages) can improve the site performance by utilizing Hostventure's caching servers. Cache servers are optimized at the filesystem level and leverage memory resources efficiently thus resulting in a great deal of performance improvement in comparison to conventional web servers, such as Apache or IIS. On demand, threshold-based and automated content replication options are available.

Error detection & redirection

Critical Web server errors are annoying and create superfluous confusion from a web visitor's perspective. HostVentures systems can monitor a customer website for common errors using page checksums or keywords. In the event that a critical error is detected, all traffic can be transparently redirected to a "site maintenance" page to inform your visitors of a site issue. Of course, an administrative alert will be issued via SMS or email to inform you about the problem with the server.

Hot-standby, redundant server

For UNIX based operating environments, HostVentures offers a unique and cost-effective solution to synchronize the existing dedicated server data to a different backup server running multiple VPS instances. In the event of a complete breakdown of a dedicated server (i.e. hard disk failure), the failover virtual server can be brought online manually with minimal effort.

To provide a redundancy for Windows based systems, HostVentures can deploy an advanced commercial solution that copies server configuration and data to a remote NAS device. This incremental backup strategy is quite effective, with typical server recovery in about 15 minutes.

Online Backup

A variety of online backup options are available. From a conventional RSYNC/TAR/CPIO backup on UNIX platforms to an innovative "software agent" based Windows backup solution; HostVentures can suggest a backup strategy for your applications, files and databases; that help ensure business continuity through recovery in as little as 15 minutes - and minimize long-term expose to risks due to data loss.

Remote power reboot

In the event of a server lock-up or crash, customers can remotely power-cycle a server with a convenient web access to APC power management device. While server lock-ups are rare, a handy remote reboot can occasionally become quite useful. Modern servers, from major vendors such as HP, Sun, Dell, and IBM are equipped with remote management cards which have remote reboot functionality and do not require a third-party solution to control the electric power to a server.

Security & Performance Features

Network based Intrusion Detection (IDS)

Network based IDS is a software program that analyzes the raw network packets as they travel over a wire and looks for patterns of malicious or suspicious intent. At the discretion of customer, a network based IDS can be configured to actively block the connections that match its signature-based rules or simply, issue alerts and provide reports based on the data collected in a specific timeframe.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

Network Address Translation (NAT) is a fairly common security technique to minimize the Internet-facing footprint of mission-critical network services. When NAT is properly configured, the internal and external access to and from the NAT'ed server can be transparently controlled using a set of protocol specific rules that can grant or deny access to a NAT'ed server. Typical NAT usages are ecommerce applications, databases and any other web based solutions that would benefit from an extra layer of security protection without the complexities of application-layer firewalls.

SSL Traffic Acceleration

SSL hardware acceleration solutions can dramatically improve the performance of secure web sites and services, such as e-commerce, web email and Intranet portals. By off-loading CPU intensive encryption and decryption functions to an external network device, web servers process the web content faster and the latency, often attributed to overhead of encryption, is greatly minimized.