Philly Webmaster recognizes that downtime is not an option for your servers. That's why we continually improve our hardware and facilities to ensure that you are up and running, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Data Center

The Philly Webmaster Data Center is located in Baltimore, Maryland, part of the greater Washington-Baltimore technology corridor and near the I-95 highway and Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The Data Center is easily accessible from cities all over the East Coast. Located in the heart of Baltimore's downtown area and financial district, the Data Center is located on a redundant power grid that has three power stations. Two major banks are also relying on this power grid.

The security of the Data Center is a top priority for Philly Webmaster. We have taken extreme care to implement the most stringent security measures so our customers can rest easy knowing their data is safe. The Data Center is located in a heavily protected building with security personnel on guard 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Other security features include biometric fingerprint readers on door locks and fire protection by Pre-Action Fire Sprinkler and Halon System.

The Data Center is monitored around the clock by ADT's state-of-the-art temperature sensors. Air temperature is maintained at an optimal 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Large fans pull filtered air into each server's protective case, ensuring that dust and particles remain safely outside the server. The cooling system includes 44 tons of chilled-water cooling, 40 tons of air-chilled cooling, and two 10 ton portable Liebert industrial air conditioners maintaining optimal temperature over 5,000 square feet of raised flooring.

Our internally-developed monitoring system keeps a constant check on the health of your servers, notifying us in advance of any potential problems. If something unforeseen does occur, the Data Center is prepared. There are redundant hot swap power supplies for each server. If a power supply fails, the server keeps running with power from the alternate supply while alarms alert technicians who quickly restore redundancy. Due to this preparation, servers and client sites experience no downtime. In the unlikely event of power outage on the 3 tier Baltimore Gas & Electric power grid, our automatic transfer switches activate the backup power system consisting of a 300 kVW diesel generator. The diesel generator can run indefinitely until outside power is restored.

Network

Our Data Center's location was chosen to maximize the proximity to several large telecommunications providers. AT&T, MCI, MFS, Cogent, and Qwest have stations located in our building's basement. Instead of relying on phone circuits, our local loops connect directly to their equipment in the same building. Because of our partnerships with Cogent and Qwest, we maintain a strong Internet presence in international realms as well as domestic areas.

Our network operations center (NOC) is a service management center that monitors and manages the entire network, individual network components, and managed services that Philly Webmaster offers. From the network operations center, we monitor the availability of all data and equipment, control bandwidth capacity, reroute traffic flows to optimize response times, and manage service level agreements on a customer-by-customer basis. The network operations center constantly monitors systems and proactively identifies problem areas before they become an issue.

Our Intelligent Network takes advantage of a unique and powerful technology to "intelligently" route data along the quickest path at any given time. By calculating the best route depending on traffic usage, network issues and the location the data is sent to, the Intelligent Network ensures the most efficient path every time. If your business depends on delivering content at top speed and efficiency to every user, every time, the Intelligent Path Network is the ultimate solution!

The network infrastructure has been meticulously designed to eliminate single points of failure. In addition to high redundancy, we have hardware on site at all times to quickly replace any problem area in the event of failure. We run our own fully redundant Cisco network with hot failover at all layers together with HSRP inbound and BGP-4 outbound routing.

Industry analysis reveals that 70% of downtime of over 10 hours with any ISP is caused by telephone circuit failure. With Philly Webmaster, circuit failure is virtually eliminated. That's because our NOC is in the same building as AT&T, MCI, MFS and Qwest. There is no phone circuit between our NOC and these providers. Instead, there is a direct connection between our Cisco routers and theirs.

Our providers also have peering connections with other major Tier 1 providers that allow traffic to be switched to alternate backbones should the need arise.

Too often providers operate their networks at three to four times their responsible capacity. As a result, their corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms. Our daily average at the NOC is 27% of its capacity, with midday peak spikes reaching only 33% capacity.

Hardware

Philly Webmaster web servers are custom-built industrial machines designed for a 24/7 web serving environment. Our Servers are powered by Dual Xeon Pentium 4 3.0 GHz or faster with 4GB+ of RAM. Our servers include RAID5 for redundancy and security. You'd be hard pressed to find a more stable, and faster server available. All our systems are custom built to our needs and specifications. In addition, our NOC is equipped with an inventory of identically configured, burned-in standby servers.

When Philly Webmaster powers your web sites, you never have to concern yourself with developing, maintaining or upgrading the operating system on the servers. That's because Philly Webmaster has a round-the-clock staff of head-of-class, highly skilled system administrators, network security specialists and hardware technicians. Unlike many web hosting companies, we do not outsource support or server administration. Every one of our staff members is based in the USA. We go the extras mile to ensure that your web sites are up and running on a secure, stable, high performance platform.

In addition, Philly Webmaster proactively monitors the servers housing your web site to ensure optimal performance. Remember, system administration is automatic. When you are assured of a fast, secure and reliable hosting environment, you can concentrate all the more on growing your business.

Automated Systems Administration has monitoring software integrated into the operating system. This software is designed to monitor, report and fix various system processes according to a regiment of criteria. With the direction of the Philly Webmaster data center staff, operating a secure, stable and reliable web site has never been easier.

What it all means

Philly Webmaster customers receive fast, reliable and centrally managed Internet connectivity service.