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Our Network: Effortless Hosting
A-Team Systems leverages the power and experience of three independent hosting providers spanning two continents to provide its hosting customers with the peace of mind no other single-site provider can deliver: Truly global redundancy, affordably. Even our most basic hosting package includes this technology, providing protection for web and email services.
Our Philosophy
All ISPs and hosting providers strive to avoid and mitigate risks of failure through diligent planning and diversification of critical services. However there are events that are cost-prohibitive to insure against (where the only solution is to have multiple copies of everything in multiple distant places), and while rare, our experience with Murphy's Law says invariably something will go wrong.
We're not slighting traditional providers (in fact we use them ourselves!) but our philosophy is to build on their strength by leveraging multiple locations and companies. Our platform seamlessly and securely maintains copies of our customer's applications, web sites and data on servers around the globe.
We provide this at an affordable price with zero configuration needed by you. We maintain everything behind the scenes, so you can focus on your business. In the event of an outage, we take care of it, and will move your sites seamlessly over to one of our other servers for you.
Our 15 years of Internet experience has taught us that even the best hosting companies and facilities can suffer potentially long-running outages, entirely outside their control. Below are some examples we've witnessed or been affected by over the years:
- Acts of God which literally destroy the facilities: Lightning strikes, fires which consume the entire block, floods which ruin all electronics, etc. It can take weeks or months to rebuild from off-site backups.
- High-level telecommunications failures: Redundant Internet peering only works if the phone company's infrastructure works. Manhole/service tunnel fires, hazardous material spills, floods and blatant incompetence cause full scale failures for entire areas that affect all connections.
- Redundant power failures: Battery backups, multiple power grids and so forth provide great redundancy at the source, but eventually need to converge into a switch or relay. You're left with a single device, no matter how well built, that everything relies on. These devices fail, and bring everything down with it. What's worse is these devices are usually extremely expensive and can take days to find a replacement and a qualified technician to install.
- Planning Catch-22 failures: In one incident we witnessed an extended power outage which triggered the battery backup system at a data center. Everything was running great but the batteries began producing large amounts of heat (normal during extended use). By the time extra cooling was triggered the heat had reduced the power output of the batteries, and they could no longer provide enough power to bring the additional cooling units online. Eventually everything had to be shut down to prevent overheating and damage.
- Cascade Catch-22 failures: An event caused a rapid spike in data center temperatures. Normally additional cooling would be brought online automatically, but due to a faulty temperature probe, it did not. By the time someone was on site to respond, the additional cooling system could not be powered on because the ambient temperature was already too high to meet the unit's operating range. All but the most critical services had to be powered off.
