Shared Hosting FAQ

What is the experience level of the hosting team?

Average tenure of 10 years experience in the hosting and colocation business

Is phone support available?

Immediate phone or email support is available during business hours. After-hours support is available as a remote hands service.

How many websites are hosted on each server?

In our hosting cluster services are distributed among servers. Typically our platforms run at 20% utilization with 200 sites or less per server. Many hosts load 1,000 sites or more per server resulting in diminished performance. Budget hosts also typically load many services onto one platform (e.g. DNS, Mail, SQL, and Web Server).

How are the hosting platforms protected from hackers?

Profitability.net uses many best practices to protect our clients’ data including, but not limited to Intrusion Prevention, Firewalls, Patch Management and strict policies regarding third party applications.

What prevents other users’ code from having a negative impact on my site?

Having your site impacted by other people’s poor code is a common pitfall of shared hosting. While it is not possible to completely remove that risk, Profitability.net takes several measures to help prevent one site from impacting the performance of other sites hosted on the same server. On Windows servers, each site runs in its own Application Pool which means it runs in a dedicated IIS process with its own memory space. This provides better performance, security, and reliability for your site. Most hosting providers do not do this because it is processor and memory intensive, limiting the number of websites that can be hosted on a single machine. Additionally, Profitability.net monitors several performance metrics on each web server, which helps us identify, diagnose, and (if necessary) disable bad code before it can cause performance problems for your site.

Does Profitability.net provide design or site maintenance services?

No, our development partners provide design, marketing, search engine optimization and site maintenance services. Please contact us for a recommendation based upon your site requirements.

Is spam and virus filtering available?

Profitability.net has partnered with Postini and Frontbridge to provide two options for email filtering. A free trial is available.

What backup procedures does Profitability.net use to protect my data?

You should not solely rely upon Profitability to backup your site data as part of your disaster recovery strategy. Profitability.net utilizes NetVault software by Bakbone to backup all of our core systems. Our backup schedule includes 4 master backups and incremental backups for the previous week. Clients also have access to backup certain files at any time via the client control panel.

Does Profitability.net provide domain registration and digital certificates?

Yes, as a courtesy to our clients we provide domain registration and digital certificate management services. As part of this service you will receive email reminders to renew any domains or certificates prior to expiration.

What is the physical address of the datacenter?

312 Plum Street in Cincinnati, Ohio

Is the datacenter manned 24×7?

Yes

What physical security systems are currently in place?

Control room off the elevator requires a keycard and pin. Access to the datacenter requires fingerprint scan and keycard

Are a UPS system and generator in place?

Yes

Is the backup generator on a closed transition switch?

Yes and it is tested weekly and load tested monthly

Is there a fire suppression system in place?

A dry-pipe sprinkler system and a Halon system

What carriers do you utilize?

MCI, Level3 and Corecomm

How do you measure uptime?

All core systems and web servers are monitored every 1 minute 24×7

Do you measure server health performance such as CPU, Memory and Storage utilization?

All servers are monitored 24×7 every 1 minute. Performance indicators alert us if usage exceeds normal operating thresholds and enables accurate capacity planning.

Are spare parts kept onsite for critical routers, switches, firewalls and servers?

Yes. Spare parts are maintained onsite for all core devices not in a high availability configuration

What hosting platform software is used?

Profitability.net has used HSphere for the past 3 years

What hosting platforms are available?

Redhat ES (Apache), Windows 2000 and 2003 (IIS)