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August 24, 2001 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – Despite a sluggish overall economy and the need to battle against the monthly waves of Code Red Virus onslaughts, C I Host (cihost.com) has spent more than $500,000 over the past few months to significantly improve its network, expand its physical facilities and add staff.
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The heavy infusion of capital by C I Host to upgrade its technology and
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services at the same time it is opening new data centers signals its
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confidence in the Internet industry.
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”We continue to grow and are bigger and better than ever,” said
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Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. ”We can’t stop improving our
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services just because some hacker someplace is determined to undermine the
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health of our industry.”
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Over the past six months, C I Host has:
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Upgraded all shared hosting servers to Dual 1 GHz with 1 Gb of RAM,
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making the machines faster and better equipped to handle client demands.
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Upgraded the firewall systems with load balanced firewalls capable
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of handling 800 Mb of sustained traffic and up to 50 million concurrent
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connections.
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Load-balanced network’s routers and firewalls on 4 F5 BIP-IP
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Enterprises devices, allowing for 99.999% uptime on core routing gear.
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Added a fourth nameserver off-site and on a different IP block and
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network, located at the Los Angeles data center and designed to make C I
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Host’s network more resistant to hacker and DoS attacks.
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Installed an additional 100 tons of N+1 redundancy air conditioning
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to keep clients’ servers cool and running smoothly.
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In early September, C I Host will upgrade two more bandwidth circuits to OC
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3, Sprint and Global Crossing, giving the network a maximum capacity of 645
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Megabits of bandwidth, up from the current 425 Megabits. C I Host’s addition
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of the fourth nameserver is especially important in foiling hacker attacks,
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according to Stuart Bailey, founder and CTO of InfoBlox, Inc., based in
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Evanston, Illinois. InfoBlox makes high performance domain name servers that
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provide high reliability and performance but are simple to manage.
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”The kind of architecture C I Host is creating takes away a single point of
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failure,” Bailey said. ”If one segment of the network is attacked or goes
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down, you protect your entire network from a myriad of security issues.
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Without it, you are vulnerable to attack.”
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In addition, C I Host has hired 25 new employees in its call center to
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reduce on-hold and response times by as much as 25 percent. The Bedford
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facility has been expanded by 5,000 square feet to keep up with client
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demand; the Los Angeles center opened in May and the London Center is due to
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open in December.
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”Our clients will benefit from our improvements by having increased speed,
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protection and reliability,” said Jason McCarthy, IT operations manager.
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”The upgrades will be seamless, our clients won’t notice anything, just
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that their web site, email and e-commerce are all up and running faster than
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ever.”
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C I Host continues to add about 5,200 new clients each month and has
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consistently maintained an industry-low churn rate of 4 percent. In July,
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however, the churn rate hit 6 percent due to an extra 250 clients who left
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due to slowdowns caused by the Code Red virus attack. Even though C I Host
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was one of the few companies that completely patched its servers against
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Code Red, it was affected because even patched servers are slowed by Code
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Red as infected computers constantly send signals to healthy computers,
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looking for possible vulnerabilities.
