Memset proves why you can rely on the cloud

With a number of high profile cloud computing outages grabbing the headlines and many naming reliability as a major concern with cloud services, Memset, who recently topped Netcraft’s reliability survey in March for delivering the world’s most reliable service, shows why you should be putting your faith in the cloud.

World’s best hosting service

Netcraft, which began analysing Internet technology in 1995, publishes an independent, unbiased monthly survey of Web hosting companies. It is the oldest and most respected web survey in the industry.

To compile the list, Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers’ sites.  The performance measurements are made at fifteen-minute intervals from separate points around the globe, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.  They have named Memset as having the most reliable site during March 2010.

Memset's reliability is not a one-off, either; they have consistently been in the top 10 on the Netcraft survey since

Relying on open source and virtualisation

Memset uses open source based firewalling (IP tables with custom modifications) and load balancing (Linux Virtual Server) on commodity harware (paired 1U Dell PowerEdge 860's) to front their network, which raises questions over the need for expensive firewalling and routing solutions.

Further, their main site (www.memset.com), which is what Netcraft actually monitor, is hosted on a load-balanced pair of Miniserver VMs®. Memset uses open source (free) Xen for their virtualised platform, further reducing their cost base.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, said: "We firmly believe in eating our own dog food, and that we have achieved this level of uptime and responsiveness using the same low-cost virtual machines that we sell to our clients really showcases the enterprise-readiness of virtualised Cloud infrastructure. You don't need expensive, carbon-intensive dedicated machines to achieve top-class reliability."

A key innovation of Memset's has been to provide load balancing and fail-over on their Miniserver VM virtual servers. This allows customers to get the reliability of a clustered multi-server system without the costs of physically dedicated servers, which are often much more powerful than required anyway.

Reliability doesn't come at a price

Whilst many providers have been struggling to provide reliable delivery over the internet, and deliver appropriate bandwidth and performance at a reasonable cost, Memset proves that reliability doesn’t need to cost a lot. Memset offers the market's widest range of Cloud solutions, from individual 512MB virtual machines starting from just £9.95 per month right up to their enterprise quad-quad-core R900's with 128GB RAM and 8 15k RPM SAS drives for £979 per month.

Kate Craig-Wood continued, “This also shows that you do not need to be hosted inside the M25 London for super-fast response times - our data centres are in Reading.”

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For further information, please contact:

press@memset.com