Solid.net Server Information

Once upon a time we were pretty public about what kind of hardware we had on the net and the amount of it.  We have had to change that policy of openness because of the security attacks currently prevalent on the net.  If you would like to see an early version of this page just click here.  But we are willing to say that at the current time all of the machines have either Intel or AMD cpus and are running LINUX.  We have not changed our original philosophy to divide up the load among a number of affordable sets of hardware instead of a smaller number of more expensive RISK or who knows what servers. By doing this, we can easily add additional machines as the demands on the system increase. We still feel that to increase performance money is often best spent on additional memory (which based upon historical prices is currently almost free) instead of more complex hardware.

We prefer this multiple dedicated server concept to the virtual machine concept because it makes it much more difficult for an out of control task to seriously impact the total system. We do serve multiple virtual domains from our web servers, but we carefully select who should co-exist on each machine.

We have a secure apache web server running our catalog server.  Customers with other servers at our POP are welcome to use it for e-business.  We can configure any server to be a secure server (https: requests), an insecure server (http: requests), or both. However, most of the time we do not configure web servers to be secure because of the additional key costs, the increased bandwidth used by secure servers, and the additional time spent encrypting and decrypting pages. (The last two directly impact people looking at your pages because they load slower and require extra processing on their machine before the page can be displayed.)

We typically have enough spare parts on hand to completely replace two or more machines in case of any failure. However, the number of failures we have had since we started in 1995 is minimal. We have a number of UPS's providing stable power to the server farm.  The minimum backup power available to any of our servers is for over two hours.  Some servers could operate under battery power for twelve hours or more.

Unlike the early versions of this page we no longer feel it is in our best interest or our customer's best interest to discuss our security features or our connections to the net on a web page like this.  However, this information is shared with our customers and potential customers.

Our server customers are companies who do their own web development or web developers who do the majority of the work for their customers but do not have the knowledge, commitment, or time to maintain their own server(s). We provide this for much less than someone would pay for a reliable connection and their own staff.  All our servers are monitored on a 24/7 basis.  Anyone who has a dedicated server here can be added to the list of people who are paged in case of problems with the server.

We have no major restrictions on what you can do with a co-located server except that you must in general act like a good net citizen and don't do anything that might get the attention of the local chief of police. If you put porn on our servers we are going to have arguments with you about it.  So if you intend to do that you would be better off looking elsewhere.  You also cannot sell to customers who resell bandwidth on our servers.  And last but not least, our servers can not be used for sending unsolicited email or anything else that might be considered spamming.

We firewall all our servers and constantly monitor that functions that are supposed to be disabled or blocked on a given server are truly in that state.

We have had a web site here that typically got 175000 or more hits per day, others that got only a few, and the rest have run most of the range in-between. We also have machines dedicated to mail list processing. One mail list located here had over 15600 subscribers and the owner of that list sent out two 10k messages per week.

If you would like a dedicated server, or would like to have your web pages on one of our servers, send an email message to newservice@solid.net with a note about what services you need. Within 48 hours we can usually have a new server configured for your needs.

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last changed 07-Feb-02