When websites are business-critical, they need multiple servers. These servers need to be load-balanced or in failover modes. This means that if one server fails, for any reason, the other continues on. ICO has a great deal of experience with hardware and software load-balancing, SQL clustering and failover plans. ICO's Genuine INTEL Manufactured Servers (dual core and quad core) form the basis of our clusters. All have Dual Processor motherboards, RAID 1 mirrored hard drives, dual network cards, PCI Express and PCI-X slots and can take 32GB of RAM.

 

Our multiple server installations use physically separate cages within our data centre to provide another buffer against failure.

 

We can provide totally redundant systems with varying SLAs and if required, provide geographic redundancy, with servers located in different Data Centres.

 

 

There is no such thing as the “perfect server for the job”. In our experience with new applications, you rarely know exactly what’s going to happen in real life, after that application goes live on the Internet. Despite the best internal tests, it may well turn out that the application is more CPU-intensive than estimated, or it could be disk or RAM intensive or all three! It can also be difficult to estimate actual users and sessions. So making a commitment to a server that “looks like it will do the job” may be a big mistake. You may be locking yourself into too little, or too much.

 

At ICO we understand this. And it’s why we have never just “filled an order”. We like to talk with you, find out what you’re trying to achieve and find out what is required. We are always looking for two things. The minimum required and the logical growth path from there. We take a lot of things into account and we almost always provide a ‘proof of concept’ site or server for you so that you can do some live server testing. If you’ve done other testing, we take that into account, along with our own experience with similar applications.

 

We always have a growth plan in place, and we are always ready to either upgrade your server or provide you with a totally new one, if that’s what’s required. No penalty. In ICO's world, you will never have to live with outdated or under-powered technology.