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Clustered Hosting: A Better Hosting Technology
A Concentric® White Paper
This document will demonstrate the benefits of
Concentric® Clustered Hosting and show how
sites benefit from hardware redundancy, load-
balanced traffic flow, resources-on-demand,
elevated security and greater administrative
ease for the same price as other services – all
from a provider that, since 1997, has been
leading the industry and has received a U.S.
patent in clustering technology.
The software available for setting up a shared
hosting server can enable a provider to establish
a reasonably featured hosting service on a
single server for several hundred (or even
thousands) of accounts. Customers hosted on
this server will be isolated to one server and
share that server’s resources, including disk,
CPU, memory and Internet connection.
Customers hosted on this server- are vulnerable
to many things that can impair service, including:
• High-traffic neighbors whose sites use a
higher-than-expected share of the server's
resources and squeeze out their neighbors
• Denial of Service attacks that congest a
server’s uplink, overload the shared local disk
drives, or overwhelm the shared CPU
• Poorly written or malicious scripts that
occupy processing power
• Any of the well-documented problems
associated with shared hosting email
management.
Exacerbating the problem of limited platform
capabilities is the state of the shared hosting
industry. Competition is at an all-time high, and
most providers find it hard to differentiate their
service from their competitors. To maintain
profits with their service delivery platform,
shared hosting service providers must maximize
the number of customers on the platform and
minimize the level of service and resources
provided to them. These goals are exactly
opposite of the need