Connectivity
Reliability
Without internet connection the best servers are useless. But leased lines fail sometimes – wether it is the famous excavator, tempests or failing components. Thus it is very important to select uplink providers carefully, and to have more than one.
We run multiple independent uplinks, using multiple fiberoptic connections. Redundancy is handled by BGP4.
Performance
Many providers are advertising huge uplink bandwidth. This has often no practical relevance. It is common to place servers in one’s uplink provider’s data center. All servers located there share the bandwidth. Nobody is able to tell you how much bandwidth lasts for your site. It is quite common to overbook lines dramatically – this saves a lot of money, but results in poor performance. For example, it doesn’t buy you anything if your provider has an 155 Mbit/s uplink but 300 Mbit/s are actually needed.
We don’t overbook our lines. Whenever the load reaches 80% (for more than a few minutes) we are looking for more bandwidth. And we make sure we can scale up bandwidth on short notice. Thus, your site is always reachable at full speed.