Plutomic Hosting Blog

As you know we have most of our equipment located in the Philadelphia metro area in a data center which was designed for the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. We have been tracking Hurricane Irene since Monday evening and would like to give all of you a brief summary of our preparations for the storm. As of Friday morning our operations manager let us know that we have enough fuel on site to last for 8 days before refueling would be required, pictures of the generators are below this post. The facility will be staffed around the clock with extra hands as well as maintenance crews to repair any storm damage should it occur. The on site crews have ample food and water to ride out the storm without requiring any outside assistance. Our data center is above the 500 year flood plain and features under floor monitoring for water, smoke and fire. The floor is also another 3 feet above the concrete slab. The data center has multiple redundant links from opposite sides of the building.

Bottom line we expect no service interruptions for our customer at all due to the storm. If things change we will keep you posted through here and our facebook and twitter.

Another exciting day at our new data center facility. A few short days ago a brand new 1.5MW Detroit Diesel generator was delivered. This was after many delays due to inclimate weather in the northeast including high winds and many feet of snow the delivery finally happened. The generator was brought online shortly after installation and is now ready to provide backup power at a moment’s notice.

As many of our long time customers already know we’ve been using the same logo and tag line for quite some time now. Since February of 2006 we’ve had the same diamond shaped logo with a few slight variations on the tag line. After many months of work last year we came up with a design that we all liked and started rolling it out to the various systems we have. The culmination of this was the site launch on December 20th 2010.

The new site is not simply another redesign but a much more effective way for our customers to utilize our services. One of the features that we specifically worked on for the new site is the integrated customer login. Now when logging into your hosting account you would use the same email address and password for both the Customer Center and your cPanel. For those of you who still enjoy accessing cPanel by visiting yourdomain.com/cpanel that will still work for you using your cpanel username and password, however those of you who would like to remember only one set of credentials for your Plutomic Hosting accounts visiting www.plutomic.com is the easiest way for you to manage your services.

We have moved to a new data center in Philadelphia, PA. The data center we moved to was originally design to house the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which has since been acquired by the NASDAQ. Plutomic Hosting was one of the first companies to move into this new space. We made the move without any downtime or disruption to our customers, which is always our top priority.  You can view some pictures from our new data center at www.plutomic.com/dc.php

Since this building was built for the Philadelphia Stock Exchange from the ground up it has many layers of redundancy and as such, is the only purpose built data center in the Center City Philadelphia market. Our new facility is located within the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which unlike other data centers that may only have a few cameras around, has taken security much farther. The Navy Yard takes physical access very seriously. The complex is surrounded on all sides with a chain link fence, topped with barbed wire. In addition there are guards stationed around the perimeter 24/7/365 which require ID to enter the complex as well as roving patrols around the grounds of the entire complex.  The data center itself has proximity key card access, biometric readers and a man-trap in addition to a multitude of cameras around the building. All servers and routing equipment are housed in locked cabinets. We thought you’d enjoy knowing what type of security is keeping your data safe.

NEW SERVICES:

Philadelphia Colocation
Since moving into our new data center facility, we have begun offering colocation services. We offer per U, 1/4 rack, 1/2 rack and full rack configurations. Unlike the older facilities that have maxed out their power and cooling for their space, our facility is designed to allow for configurations of 10+ KW per rack, which is more than double that of the competition. Since we have access to more power and cooling, our customers get more bang for the buck because they can actually fully utilize their rack. All of these services benefit from the redundant cooling, power distribution and diverse fiber connectivity offered by our location in the Center City Philadelphia market.

In the coming weeks and months ahead please check our blog often because we have a lot more new and exciting things in the works.

Sometimes the price to GB ratio for hard drive space really seems to make the “Unlimited Hosting” worth the price. Upon closer examination, you’ll start to realize that it isn’t exactly what it seemed. The typical reason you would shop for “Unlimited Hosting” is because you don’t have a firm grasp on your real needs. Most people figure that if it’s “Unlimited Hosting” how can I go wrong?

The truth is there is no such thing as unlimited hosting. No one manufacturers an unlimited hard drive. It simply doesn’t exist. It all boils down to a marketing ploy to get more people who want “all you can eat hosting” for one low monthly price. Which is what they get at first.

A few weeks or months after launching your site, you would have a better idea of how much disk space and monthly transfer you’re actually using. You can use this information to find a hosting package that fits your needs perfectly. This information is monitored by your control panel, either cPanel, Plesk, etc. There are also monthly bandwidth statistics included with most hosting accounts that are an invaluable resource for you. These detail how much monthly transfer your account has used over the past few months. For a new start up web site it could be as low as a few hundred megabytes of transfer all the way up to and over a Terabyte of total transfer.

With these pieces of information you can get off the oversold server your site is currently on and stop subsidizing these resource hog neighbors of yours . Below is a quick check list to figure out what you would need for your new hosting account:

• Has my month to month, or year to year transfer rate increased or decreased? Take your current month and subtract it from the previous month to figure out the overall increase/decrease.
• Disk space: how much am I currently using on my account over the total available? Hint:: If you’re control panel currently says “unlimited” for the total available disk space, RUN!
• Are there features that I’d like to have that are currently not included with my current package? If so make a check list of these and be sure to ask your prospective hosts if they have them.
• How often are the backups taken at this new host? Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly? You want to know how often they take a snapshot of your invaluable data.
• Does this company own their equipment or simply lease equipment from a 3rd party? You want to get as close to the source as you can because it will mean that you will have a better quality of service since you provider has more control over your hosting environment.

These are a few tips to get you started. If you have any other tips or questions please feel free to comment.

Good luck in your search!

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