TESTIMONIALS: What They Said
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Small Biz ISP Shanje Provides Top-Level Uptime to 21,000 Websites with Coyote Point's Equalizer Load Balancing Appliance Enables Sevenfold Growth in 18 Months for Virtual Server Host
Shanje.com, a web hosting company that specializes in virtual server hosting solutions for web designers, has achieved major league reliability thanks to Equalizer, Coyote Point's intelligent load balancer. Before installing Equalizer, Shanje's reliability was constantly threatened by customers' malfunctioning scripts and by memory leaks within the OS, databases, and application servers. Equalizer avoids downtime by automatically bypassing down servers. It also reduces connection time by routing incoming traffic among server clusters, using multiple criteria to determine which server is best equipped to take each hit.
Shanje offers Virtual Server Hosting, a solution enabling web designer to pay a flat rate for an unlimited number of domains, ftp accounts, databases, and email accounts. For as little as US $25 per month, a web designer can host dozens of websites at Shanje, functioning as a "virtual ISP" for its customers.
Increased Uptime Enables Rapid Growth
The combination of flat rates and high availability has made Shanje's Virtual Server Hosting a popular solution for web designers. The increased reliability enabled by Equalizer has helped Shanje grow its virtual server hosting service from 3,000 sites hosted in August 1999, when the company installed its first Equalizer, to over 21,000 today.
A Critical Decision
As with any growth spurt, Shanje's caused some growing pains. Literally thousands of webmasters are taking advantage of ASP and Cold Fusion at Shanje, and while Shanje offers SQL Server options, many of these webmasters use MS Access as a low cost database solution. Unfortunately, these MS Access databases can often lock up the web and application services. It quickly became clear that uptime and reliability would suffer if Shanje did not implement a solution for actively monitoring and responding to server problems.
"Regardless of our efforts, we cannot prevent servers from having problems from time to time," said Shiloh Jennings, founder of Shanje. "But we can monitor and immediately react to server problems, while using the load balancer to route traffic around any malfunctioning unit. If the monitoring and reaction is automated well enough, very high levels of uptime can be obtained. Equalizer automates the monitoring as well as providing failover."
Shanje decided to load balance every website hosted on its servers. To accomplish this, Shanje needed to find a reliable, low-cost, standalone load balancer. Shanje did not want to use a software-only solution, since such solutions can often be affected by other software updates (such as operating system service packs). After looking at a number of options, Shanje chose the Coyote Point Equalizer.
Equalizer not only immediately detects server problems and route traffic only to servers that are working properly, but also provides support for custom server agents (monitoring software that runs on each server within the load balanced server group). Equalizer polls Shanje's custom server agents to decide which servers are working properly. Shanje's server agents in turn monitors specific ASP and Cold Fusion URLs. If the server agent detects a problem on a server, no more traffic is routed to that server and that server's self-healing scripts are activated.
Using this automated solution, Shanje is currently providing an average uptime of 99.95% for all of its Virtual Server customers. Without any human intervention, Shanje's servers quickly and immediately recover from problems. Coyote Point's Equalizer makes sure traffic only goes to servers that are up and responding properly.
"Our Virtual Server business model provides web designers with a low-maintenance, low-cost solution for hosting multiple small business websites. Coyote Point's Equalizer adds high availability to the equation," Mr. Jennings concluded. "Equalizer makes it easy for Shanje to provide Virtual Servers with the uptime that web designers need."
About Shanje
Shanje provides Virtual Server Hosting to Web site designers and other businesses offering ecommerce services to small businesses. Headquartered in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Shanje has data centers in Flint, MI and London, UK. Shanje can be contacted directly at support@shanje.com or on the web at http://www.shanje.com
About Coyote Point Systems
Coyote Point Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of server management devices for enabling scalable, highly-available server clusters. Recognized for intuitive configuration and low maintenance, price/performance and superior trending analysis, Coyote Point's Equalizer ensures fast connections and fail-safe 24x7 access to web sites and other critical Internet and intranet applications. Coyote Point solutions support all Internet protocols and accommodate all operating systems. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA and can be contacted directly at 650-969-6000 or on the web at http://www.coyotepoint.com
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