Sharp Array Systems - web hosting and ICT services

Hosting

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Uptime

Sharp Array systems is not a traditional web hosting company – we specialize in cloud computing server technology that distributes your site over an entire array of servers.

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Most hosting companies ask, "How can we fit the most websites onto each server?" Sharing a server means an errant script used on a neighboring site can bring your site down as collateral damage. So we decided to turn the question around, asking, "How can we have the most servers respond for each website?"

Sharp Array systems is a family owned business that is built on the highest standard of customer service and technology, in an industry that is legendary for poor customer care (amongst other negative points)

Most web hosts excite new prospects into buying their services by offering web hosting plans that boast huge amounts of storage, bandwidth, email and databases. An excellent way to excite somebody who maybe new to servers, storage, bandwidth and AUP’s - In practice however, most users do not require such space or bandwidth for a company or personal web site and will never use such system resources.

Even a 20 page flash animation web site doesn’t need much space on a server to operate.

Other web hosting plans offer unlimited everything - where this may be true with regards to domains and databases every web hosting company will make you sign an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) In the AUP there will be a clause regarding Excessive Use of System Resources. This means that if you use too much bandwidth or storage they can suspend your account. Some hosts will not define what is an acceptable usage and therefore “unlimited” becomes “Unknown”

Above all once a web hosting company has your money and contract signed sealed and delivered your after sales customer care and technical support may be an absolute nightmare. You may not even be able to get a replay in this cut throat industry.

We are radically different, and for good reason. Our customers are our future and therefore are treated as we would wish to be treated if in their shoes.

In traditional web hosting, every piece of technology stands alone: sites live on a single hard drive, inside a single server, connected to the Internet through a single network connection. It's a simple setup with one big problem: if any part fails (say the server crashes or the hard drive dies) the whole system goes down, and all the websites suddenly stop responding.

To tackle the problems above, we use a radically different approach to hosting, truly enterprise-level architecture designed from the ground up to be reliable, redundant, and secure. Our proprietary technology deploys each website across entire clusters of servers, all working intelligently together, all poised and ready to instantly reroute web traffic should any component experience failure. That means when a server crashes or a hard drive fails, the other servers in the cluster pick up the slack without a byte of lost data.

It All Starts With Storage

Nothing as important as your website should be served from a single hard drive, but you'd be surprised by how many web hosts have little more redundancy than a pair of crossed fingers. We're different--and for good reason. The advanced architecture powering our hosting solution uses groups of high-performance, network attached storage devices to reliably serve every web page, image, and email. Inside each storage device, drives are mirrored to each other in a RAID configuration to create a first level of redundancy. Then, advanced software clusters the storage devices into logical groups, where files are instantly and automatically replicated across each device. And, as a final precautionary measure, all data on the system is automatically backed up continuously.

Cluster Structure

With your content stored securely, the next task is to make sure it's available each and every time it's requested. This is another area where we've taken a decidedly different approach to hosting. Most hosting companies ask, "How can we fit the most websites onto each server?" Sharing a server means an errant script used on a neighboring site can bring your site down as collateral damage. So we decided to turn the question around, asking, "How can we have the most servers respond for each website?"

It took two years and allot of dollars to answer that question, but the results are impressive. Advanced clustering technology routes each site request to not just one server, but through an army of load balanced IIS and Apache web servers. Should any server in the cluster not respond, requests are instantly and intelligently routed to the remaining servers, and the website visitor never experiences a single interruption. Contrast that to the more common approach, where a server crash simply means visitors are turned away until a technician has resolved the problem.

Special Agents

The clusters that power our hosting solution are specialized, too; each one designed and optimized to do a specific task, and to do it extremely well. Once again, intelligent routing software analyzes each request, and sends it to a server cluster that performs the task without emulation and without compromise.

Every piece of your web software, from Microsoft technologies like .Net and MS SQL, to popular open source technologies like PHP, can take advantage of the speed and reliability of an optimized, native environment, built through partnership with the actual companies that develop the software.