Frequently asked questions and answers

My company needs to serve a user base of about 100,000 people right now, but we have big expansion plans on the immediate horizon. Can our managed hosting services scale with us?

We designed both elasticity and scalability into our managed hosting service environments.

  • They’re elastic: our environments are capable of intelligently scaling up and down to meet spikes and lulls in traffic.
  • They’re scalable: if you need to enlarge your environment because your baseline levels of traffic have outgrown your plan, we can flip a few switches and upsize your environment with a few seconds of downtime and zero effort on your part.
My company has a global footprint, and we want to provide a high quality of service to our users around the planet. Do you provide a solution for this?

We have integrated Amazon’s CloudFront Content Delivery Network into our managed hosting services. CloudFront allows us to cache content in data centers around the globe, which speeds up delivery to your users.

We want to have application and database servers located around the globe along with our content delivery nodes. Can you do this?

If you need siloed systems distributed across the globe for regulatory reasons, we can deploy independent systems to different regions in the US, Canada, EU and Asia. In our experience however, serving a global audience via the CloudFront CDN provides a very high level of service and is a preferable deployment method. Placing application and database servers around the globe isn’t beneficial enough to justify the cost.

However, talk to us about your specific needs and we can work with you to develop a deployment strategy within our hosted environment that meets your needs.

My company is based in the EU, and data privacy is really important to us. Where will my data be stored?

By default, we host your data in the US, but we can place your data in the EU, UK, Australia, and many other places besides. Talk to us if you have special requirements and we’ll find the right place for you.

We’re concerned about security. How do you handle security for your managed hosting environments?

Here’s how we handle security for managed hosting:

  • All infrastructure is hosted in an ISO 27001-compliant, SOC-2 data center at Amazon Web Services.
  • All infrastructure is provisioned within Private Clouds at AWS (they call these VPCs), and are isolated from other networks.
  • No logical network connections save via port 443 are permitted between the public Internet and any hosts. Customers may elect to allow unencrypted access via port 80, but this is by special request only.
  • All remote administrative access takes place via an IPSec or TLS VPN tunnel.
  • All hosts are patched as a part of each release.
  • Critical OS and software patches are deployed on an as-needed basis if they are released between release cycles of Content Controller.
  • Our continuous integration system builds your hosts from scratch every time we deploy an update. This ensures total consistency during the build process, enforces our security update process and provides change control over every aspect of the build and update process for both hosts and the network infrastructure upon which the hosts run.
  • Public-facing hosts are scanned for vulnerabilities weekly, and any identified critical vulnerabilities remediated within one week.
  • Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) logs are retained for 35 days in the active index, and are stored in an archive for 400 days.
We want a highly-available system with a solid disaster recovery plan. How do you ensure high availability and a reliable DRP?

We manage high availability and disaster recovery in these ways:

  • Your application servers and database servers live in multiple, geographically separate data centers. On the off chance we can lose an entire data center, your application will keep running just fine. Our content data lives in Amazon’s S3, which has 99.9999% durability.
  • Your database runs on two servers simultaneously. If one of the database servers is damaged or offline for some reason, the secondary server makes itself the master and takes over without human intervention.
  • We snapshot your content and database servers daily just in case something truly awful happens and we have to recover from backups. We perform regular disaster recovery tests to ensure that the backed up-data is quickly recoverable.
What kind of SLA do you provide for managed hosting applications?

We provide a 99.9% SLA for all of our managed hosting applications. If your use case has different SLA requirements, no problem – we’re able to support SLAs of up to 99.99%

In practice, we operate under the assumption that downtime isn’t acceptable, and our processes are designed to facilitate zero-downtime upgrades when possible. If an upgrade requires downtime, we will communicate the need ahead of time and schedule a time during off-peak hours that is convenient for you. We know you and your clients depend on our services being up and running 24×7, and we’ve engineered our services to scale and self-heal.

What should I do from here?

When considering our products, remember you have options when it comes to who handles deployment. Reach out to us if you have questions about how you can use managed hosting Services in your Rustici Software product implementation.

Still have a question about managed hosting?

Not a problem! Reach out to us, we’re here to help.