Web farm

The Unix Web Farm

Southwest Cyberport’s web farm makes your web site faster, more reliable, and more secure, as well as costing you less money. With the new Web Farm your web site data will be stored on a Network Appliance file server and served by a redundant set of web servers.

Faster:

When a surfer on the Internet asks to look at your website, the request is farmed out to one of the available web servers. This distributes the load in the farm evenly so that a load spike on a single website won’t cause problems for other web sites on the system.

More Reliable:

Since several machines are available to serve requests, a hardware problem on a single machine won’t hurt your web site. The dead machine is simply removed from service for repair while the remaining machines continue to serve your files.

More Secure:

This architecture also makes it easier for us to pull individual servers out of the farm for upgrades and testing. This further improves reliability and helps keep the overall environment more secure since we can more easily keep the web farm machines current with all the latest security patches and software versions.

Cheaper:

Most charges for the web farm are less than those for the same services under the old pricing structure.

Most significantly, the Virtual Server, which is necessary to use your domain name for a short, memorable address, is now included in the basic fee. Additional virtual servers have also been significantly discounted.

Each site also comes with far more storage space than before — over six times as much for non-profits using the Basic plan, for instance. Plus, the old system of charging for each successful file access or ” hit” has now been replaced by transfer rates. Whereas before you would be charged the same for each file downloaded, whether it be a tiny graphic or a huge zip archive, now you will be charged just for the bandwidth required out of a generous block amount. Thus you will not be penalized for having a large number of small files embedded in your webpages.