Raw Ideas maintains our own clustered hosting environment tailored to our clients, which allows us to deliver a complex, high availability and fault tolerant hosting environment.
In addition to our own in house expertise, we are backed by our hosting partner Bulletproof, who provide our primary monitoring, backup and hardware support to help us supply the enterprise level hosting environment you require.
Our Setup
We achieve maximum uptime for our websites by using fault-tolerant load-balancers, which send requests to our proxy servers. If the content is cached locally, they will return it to the end user - otherwise they will direct the request to one of our application servers.
The application servers in turn access files from our file servers and database requests are sent to one of the database servers.
Our environment has been designed so there is not a single point of failure.
Should one of our clients have a large-scale campaign, we can easily scale resources up by adding additional application servers for the duration of the campaign - which can be anything for one day to one year.
Diverse Physical Locations
Our primary physical hosting location is Global Switch Ultimo. Internet connectivity is delivered from different providers via redundant paths including 100Mbits/sec to Internode, 100Mbits/sec to Pacnet, 100Mbits/sec to PIPE Networks Peering point (which delivers traffic to many T2 ISPs such as IINET, iPrimus, TPG, and more).
A disaster recovery physical facility is also maintained which is located at Fujitsu IDC, North Ryde. Upstream connectivity traverses the Gigabit inter-IDC connection sourced from PIPE Networks.
Security
Our environment is protected by firewalling at multiple levels as well as running segregated networks.
Access to the file systems of our environment is restricted to our technical and development team and is secured by VPN with IP end points. Content can not be uploaded directly by our clients unless it is by an approved application that we have implemented - like a Content Management System.
For security reasons, should a client require access to the file system, a separate environment is configured external to our main high availability cluster.
Monitoring
Our proactive monitoring platform allows our technical team to be alerted of pending issues and take action accordingly 24x7x365. The system provides alerts for our team as well as hosting provider engineering staff via email, LinkQ paging network and SMS.
Our hosting provider also maintains a secondary monitoring station - located in the US - which detects issues with the primary monitoring station and any Internet routing issues that may affect our environment.
For complete peace of mind, Raw Ideas also maintains our own monitoring station at another external provider in Australia.
Backups
Our hosting provider maintains daily backups of our file servers for seven days, weekly backups for 30 days and monthly backups for a year. Under our Managed Backup SLA, data recovery can occur within 3 hours.
In addition to the backups performed by our hosting provider, Raw Ideas also maintains our own offsite backup server.