Hosting Information OUR NETWORK - BETTER CONNECTIVITY Great support and great features will get you nowhere without a wide pipe. We used to advertise an OC3; now we've gone one better. Lightning Web Hosts' hosting center is with Exodus Communications, which means that we have a direct fiber optic connection between our Cisco router and theirs. Being with a Tier-1 provider means that we don't link to a backbone, we are actually on a backbone. We have no phone circuit, and don't use a Telecom link to get to the Internet; instead, we have an in-house connection directly to the Exodus ATM fiber node, located in the same building. This fiber optic line can handle the bandwidth of a T3 or an OC3, and with Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it can handle several times the bandwidth of an OC3. MULTIPLE BACKBONES We share the digital distribution architecture of Exodus, which is comprised of more than 25 high-speed private peering connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, and others. FGC also has high-speed links to 8 public exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS. To use an analogy, the private peering connections allow data to travel from New York to LA on a non-stop flight, while the public exchanges enable data to fly into the Roseburg, Oregon airport. "Sometimes the Net is slow.... " What happens when your pipe is hooked up to a faucet that just trickles? Sometimes even though your ISP and your web host are both functioning properly, you may still have a slow data transfer rate. The Internet sends information all over the country and the world, through a dozen or more computers on its way to you -- and something's always getting serviced somewhere in that long chain. Here's what we've done to speed things up: Route Optimization We have a large investment in BGP (Border Gate Protocol) technology, which allows the traffic to your site to travel more efficiently by finding the best route for data to travel. On a typical server the traffic always takes the same route from client to server. For them, if there is a bad node, traffic does not get through at all. Because we use BGP protocol, different and more efficient routes are taken between client and server depending on traffic loads and broken nodes. This means our servers automatically look for the fastest route available. Low Latency/High Throughput Often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity, and as a result the corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms for each hop along the net. One World's network daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity. Our transfer times range from 15 to 80ms routinely. Pre-installed and Configured Software: PGP, PHP 4.0.4p11, CGIwrap, C libs: glibc 2.1.3, Perl: 5.005_03, OpenSSL 0.9.6, Apache 1.3.17, Python 1.5, MySQL 3.23, JDK 1.2, FrontPage 4 (supports 97/98/2000), SSI (Server Side Includes), Akopia Interchange Home | Web Hosting Info | Domain Name Lookup | Web Hosting Features | Order Hosting | E-Commerce Info | Web Design Info | FAQ | Usage Policy | Control Panel Instructions | Help