The Symbiotic Design™ Network
Great servers and features will get you nowhere without a wide pipe. If you've hosted before on a T1 or even an OC3 connection, you're in for a pleasant surprise.

Our Servers
We are currently upgrading our servers to quad (4) 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processor based Dell servers utilizing 2GB SDRAM and three 18GB SCSI hard drives. Most servers have already been upgraded and this chore should be completed very soon.

The NOC
Our Network Operations Center is located in Baltimore, Maryland, where we have direct access to three different high-speed backbones. We use OnNet with Global Center (GC), Qwest Communications, and AT&T. This means that we have three seperate direct On Demand fiber optic connections between our Cisco 7200 router and theirs. Being OnNet with Tier 1 providers for such companies as Yahoo! and Netscape means that we don't link to a backbone, we are actually sitting directly on three backbones. We have no phone circuit, and we don't use a Telecom link to get to the Internet; instead, we have an in-house connection directly to GC's ATM fiber node, located a few floors below our servers in the same building. This fiber optic line can handle the bandwidth of a T3 or an OC3, and with GC's Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it can handle several times the bandwidth of an OC3.

Our direct connection to three highspeed Tier-1 backbones is the very reason that even if we hosted a network in my house and you lived next door, the Symbiotic Design network servers would produce results faster. It's that fast!

Multiple Tier 1 Backbones
Global Center is a global Tier 1 provider with 13,000 miles of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology providing 460 Gbps (gigabits per second) transfer worldwide. GC is comprised of more than 25 high-speed private peering connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, AOL, Best, Erols, and others. GC also has high-speed links to 8 public exchanges including both MAE East, MAE West and several NAPS. GC has an Asynchronous Transfer Mode fiber node in our building a few floors below our Network Operations Center.

Qwest comes into our building via an OC-12 line with an Asynchronous Transfer Mode fiber node as well. Qwest plans to upgrade this line to an OC-48 line in the near future. The Qwest network allows the Symbiotic Design Network to offer additional redundancy and better routes to Europe, Latin America and Asia. This gives us up to 150,000 possible routes to send each packet of traffic through our carriers.

AT&T Managed Internet Service provides us a reliable, dedicated, high-speed Internet connection and industry-leading Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Your business IP services resides on AT&T's world-class OC-192/OC-48 IP backbone, with performance continuously monitored, providing state-of-the-art network communications hardware and software, and smart routing capability.

Route Optimization
We have a large investment in BGP (Border Gate Protocol version 4) technology, which allows the traffic to your site to travel more efficiently by finding the best route for data to travel. On a typical server the traffic always takes the same route from client to server. For them, if there is a bad node, traffic does not get through at all. Because we use BGP protocol, different and more efficient routes are taken between client and server depending on traffic loads and broken nodes. This means our servers automatically look for the fastest route available.

Low Latency/High Throughput
Often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity, and as a result the corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms for each hop along the net. Symbiotic Design's network daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity. Our transfer times range from 15 to 80ms routinely.

Always Up!
We know your business depends on being online all the time. Downtime is a naughty word. The Symbiotic Design network is currently at a 99.7% uptime. We monitor all servers and use standby servers. Should one active server possibly fail, we pop out the hard drive and slide it into one of the spare servers and boot it up. The server will be back up and online within minutes.

And Backed Up!
Your data is safe with us. We backup everything weekly and backup all changes daily. We use the latest state of the art technology for firewalls and security. All personnel are screened and no one is allowed into our secure complex that doesn't belong. We know trust is earned, not given, and we will prove worthy, guaranteed.

Our Uptime Guarantee
We guarantee that your web site(s) will be up at least 99% of the time in your billing cycle or your service is free for the next billing cycle of the same length.

Since we are currently at running at 99.7% or better uptime, we don't think you'd be able to collect.

30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee:
If you are not satisfied with our advanced web hosting services you may request a full refund minus setup fee or any Domain registration ($20.00) within 30 days of your account activation. We will only ask how we might improve our web hosting services.

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