UnitedHosting Managed Cloud Hosting: Infrastructure
Built to satisfy a hunger for highly flexible, highly scalable, and ultimately reliable cloud servers:
UnitedHosting is proud to present our market leading enterprise grade cloud hosting solution. Designed from the ground up, built, and deployed on best of breed technology.
What does the cloud look like?
Below is a representation of how the UH cloud looks. We have also provided a breakdown and further explanation below the diagram to explain how the cloud actually works!
How the cloud works
Traditional server hosting places all your website data plus all the software required to run your website (PHP, MySQL, Apache, mail, etc) on to the same physical server. This works perfectly well until either the server fails (and causes you downtime) or you outgrow that server, having to physically migrate from one server to another in order to upgrade (again causing downtime).
The UnitedHosting cloud breaks you free from reliance on a single server. With a cloud server your data is placed on redundant central storage SANs while all your web services, software, and processing takes place on multiple 'Hypervisor' server nodes 'in the cloud'. This means that your services can move from one hypervisor to another automatically should something fail on one particular node or should you simply wish to utilise additional resources.
The technology behind it all
We can break our cloud server hosting infrastructure and technology down into 4 parts.
Cloud Storage SAN:
Starting from the bottom we have the all important SAN (Storage Area Network) which holds all of your files. UnitedHosting utilises 3 high performance Teravault high I/O, low latency appliances purpose built for cloud deployment. These enterprise SANs outperform traditional disk storage several fold, meaning your sites will respond faster.
Each SAN contains a RAID10 disk array allowing for uninterrupted disk failure. Our first two SANs work as an active-active pair keeping 2 separate copies of your data in sync at all times, If one SAN was to fail entirely then the other can continue to work as normal. Our 3rd SAN then takes regular snapshots of the live pair, so we have yet another level of redundancy to fall back on should the worst happen and both SANs in the live pair fail.
Cloud Hypervisors:
The actual server where your web services deploy, and processing takes place, is called a Hypervisor node. Each hypervisor node is an enterprise grade (Dell r410) resilient physical server connected to our SANs via an internal gigabit cloud network. As our cloud grows we can have up to 100 hypervisor servers within it at any one time. Your cloud server can exist (and move between) any one of these hypervisor nodes at any time.
Should one of our hypervisor nodes fail, or need to be taken down for maintenance, any cloud servers on that node will automatically failover to another node on the cloud, removing the traditional long periods of downtime associated with server failure or maintenance. Similarly if you need to increase the size of your cloud hosting capacity then your cloud server can move to one or more other hypervisor nodes, harnessing the power and flexibility of our virtually limitless pool of resources.
Cloud Network:
We run a private gigabit switching network exclusively for our cloud services. This fully redundant and fault tolerant network ensures low latency, high speed connectivity at all times and connects to the internet via the UnitedHosting core network that you already know and love. We recommend you read more about our industry leading datacentre and network upon which our cloud is hosted.
Cloud Software:
Our cloud is powered by software from OnApp. This software helps manage more than half the clouds in the world and has proven itself as a reliable software solution. We evaluated many cloud software providers over the last 2 years before settling with OnApp as a clear winner in terms of stability, flexibility and features. Aside from OnApp your cloud server still runs a suite of software you are already familiar with, including a VPS optimised cPanel hosting control panel.
Please see our managed cloud hosting packages or contact us to discuss your requirements.
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