HOSTING ARCHITECTURE AND SYSTEMS

ICG Link's shared hosting systems and VPS cloud systems architecture is best described as a high-availability private cloud. Services such as web, mail and others are spread across multiple servers with monitoring systems watching everything. If a failure occurs, the system switches the necessary services to backups and notifies our technical people. We maintain a presence in several data centers in Nashville, TN, Atlanta, GA and Phoenix, AZ.

Our private hosting cloud spans ATL and PHX in order to be in one of the most connected cities in the country and in a city that is as geographically diverse from the first as possible. From a hardware perspective, the system has a high availability SAN (file storage system) in both ATL and PHX with an N+1 VMware ESXi cluster. Our hosting platform operates across dozens of virtual machines. That the hardware is N+1 means we have enough physical equipment such that if a physical machine breaks, the VMs are automatically moved to another machine until a repair is affected.

Some additional highlights of the operations include the following:

• POWER: The remotely addressable, dual PDU.s in our racks are fed by separate UPS backed circuits. Any single power supply device is powered from an ATS fed by both circuits.
• BANDWIDTH: A tier 1 bandwidth provider feeds ATL, a second feeds PHX and a third provides connectivity between the two. Redundant switches and core routers exist at each location with an edge router at each location, meaning we can perform hardware maintenance or have an outage of a switch or router and deliver uninterrupted service.
• SECURITY: Our data centers provide key-card security at the level of the building, elevator lobby and floor with physical key access to the cabinets.
• SUPPORT: ATL and PHX data centers are manned 24/7/365. The T/W data center is manned during business hours and has emergency response crews 24/7/365.
• WEB AND DB BACKUPS: The file server for web and MySQL databases are backed up nightly.
• MAIL FILE SERVER BACKUPS: While mail systems are backed up, mail itself is not backed up because of the fluid nature of mail. It would be unlikely that any particular message could be retrieved in the event it was needed, so the effort is not attempted.
• BACKUP VERIFICATION: The drives on our backup servers are set to report their status daily such that any drive failures or capacity constraints are addressed in a timely fashion.
• SERVER UPTIME: Historically, we have achieved close to 5 9's of availability. Planned outages are not considered downtime.

In order to avoid overloads, our servers report to our technical people whenever they approach pre-established limits. This allows us to plan well in advance for necessary hardware and software expansions. A two week comparison of our system with the Top 40 business sites on the Internet showed us to be approximately 30% faster than the average.

ICG Link, Inc. is committed to providing world-class service from both a people and systems perspective. Our goal is that our experienced staff and system architecture will combine to deliver the support, reliability and performance you need for 24/7/365 web site operation.

ICG Link's server systems are layered for security purposes. The first level of security is our fully redundant firewall/router system. On the second level, only those machines that have a reason to directly access the Internet are located on our "external" network. Client data and monitoring systems exist on our "internal" network behind a third level of security.