April 1998
By Robin Gareiss
Product Leaders: Content Hosting
Web Sites That Never Falter
With Sprint's IP Web Hosting service, networkers get 100 percent uptime—guaranteed
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Want to keep the e-commerce cash coming in? Better have a Web site
that's always up and running. Corporate networkers who need that kind
of assurance may want to look into IP Web Hosting
from Sprint. The
carrier guarantees 100 percent availability—and will refund 50
percent of the monthly bill if a site is down for even a few
seconds.
How can Sprint Corp. (Kansas City, Mo.) offer such a promise
without going broke? Every machine and circuit in each data center is
redundant, says Eileen Riordan, Sprint's IP market development
manager. The carrier also duplicates Web content on four different
servers. What's more, Sprint's guarantee applies to its entire
network, including circuits, local loops, servers, and
routers—and even covers scheduled maintenance. Most other
carriers exclude maintenance, which could add up to four hours of
downtime a month.
Sounds good—but Sprint still faces stiff competition from
hundreds of other hosting providers, many of which have been in the
business longer (see "
Content Hosts Take the Work Out of the Web
,"
page 74). Its service is brand new, with no customer references, and
it's missing some key attr
ibutes, including database hosting. And
companies that sign on need deep pockets—a dedicated site goes
for $4,600 a month, more than twice what some competitors charge.
Copied Content
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Ever Ready
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Sprint has set up its service with serious business customers in
mind. There are two data centers, one in San Jose, Calif., and the
other in Relay, Md. Each is located within a POP (point of presence)
on the carrier's IP backbone, and the centers are linked to the
Internet via dual OC3 (155-Mbit/s) connections, which ensures speedy
response times.
The carrier's approach to uptime is simple: It separates content
from processing and copies it to four different servers, two in each
data center. All servers are in sync. That way, if one goes
down—even in mid-session—the data doe
sn't go down with it.
That's better than most competitors, which store content on the same
server that processes incoming requests and don't automatically copy
them to a second server.
The carrier also offers two types of hosting: dedicated and shared.
Corporate networkers who don't want to share bandwidth or who need
more server space and security can choose the dedicated option. Of
course, it costs more than the shared service, with which customers
get part of the processing capacity of 10 servers (5 at each data
center). Dedicated hosting costs $4,600 a month; shared, $2,500.
Working the Web
Here's how a typical session works: An end-user enters a Web
request, which travels to the carrier's backbone (
see the figure
).
Load balancers from RND Networks Inc. (Mahwah, N.J.) check traffic
levels and router hops to each data center and shunt the request to
the one that can process it fastest. From there, it passes through a
Cisco 7500 router, then
on to one of four local load balancers (also
supplied by RND), which channel the request to the appropriate server.
The server then grabs the pages from the content servers and delivers
the data to the end-user.
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Product Summary
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And that whole process is covered by guarantees that are among the
best in the business. Customers conducting e-commerce—whether
using the dedicated or shared option—get 50 percent of the
monthly charge back if the site goes down. Those who've chosen Sprint
to host static sites get 25 percent back. (But if customers can't
reach Sprint's network because of an Internet outage elsewhere, the
guarantees don't apply.) How does Sprint keep tabs on availability? By
continually pinging each server in each center. The results
are posted
on a private Web site, which all customers can access.
Other providers offer guarantees, but they're not as good as
Sprint's. For instance, PSInet Inc. (Herndon, Va.) offers a 100
percent uptime guarantee for shared servers only—and refunds a
mere 10 percent of the monthly bill for missing it. AT&T (Basking
Ridge, N.J.) also guarantees 100 percent uptime for shared servers,
and it refunds the entire monthly charge for missing it. But AT&T's
pledge covers the physical server only—not the circuits connected
to it. And while other major hosting providers will replicate sites
across servers, customers must specifically request it and usually are
charged more for it. GTE Internetworking Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.), for
instance, charges according to how many of its 10 data centers host
the content.
Still, Sprint lacks in a few key areas. It furnishes electronic
commerce, but not other types of hosting, like database, real
audio/video, or search engines. It also doesn't offer coloca
tion,
which lets companies manage and maintain their own Web servers at a
provider's data center. Sprint says it will offer all of
these—but it doesn't specify when.
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