InformationWeek

December 8, 1997

Failover For Small Business

Digex service aims at in-house sites

any Web-hosting companies offer hot failover to customers in case one or more of the host servers goes down. This week, Digex Inc. will start to provide a hot failover service to small and medium-sized companies that manage their own sites but want backup at an external location.

The new service, called Insurance Server, is aimed at companies that depend on their Web sites to run their business but can't afford full-scale 24x7 management and redundancy. Digex monitors customers' ports, and if they don't respond for a period of time, it automatically re-routes all traffic within minutes using Cisco Distributed Director technology to Digex servers in Beltsville, Md. Traffic is sent back to the primary servers when they are functional again. Companies pay a flat monthly fee beginning at about $1,000 for each server.

"For us, it's protecting against hardware failure, software failure, firewall issues" and connectivity problems at local ISPs, says Jermaine Allen, Webmaster at netComponents in Delray Beach, Fla., which operates a database of products from 300 electronic parts suppliers. "A lot of the other services wanted to charge us for another line-but we're not planning on using this service as another site." Also, netComponents doesn't want to pay for bandwidth that may be used only occasionally, he adds. Digex's service will be attractive for companies that want their sites in-house because they are constantly updating content or doing a lot of database manipulations, Allen says.

Others, however, aren't so sure. "It would be pretty difficult to back up our site that way because it's maintained on a 15-Gbyte RAID system," says Scott Cole, CEO at online retailer Mass Music Inc. in Union City, Calif. "We basically have to have our own system."

Digex this week is also announcing another, similar product called Disaster Server, which provides secondary servers within a few hours. It costs about $800 per server per month.

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