Lets get started with the basics. What is managed hosting? What are managed servers? First off, managed hosting at Intertune means you completely rely on our expertise to outsource your web hosting needs. That means we take care of the system administration, security, data backups, monitoring, network and everything else involved in keeping your hosting infrastructure humming. So if you wanted to describe what managed dedicated servers are, you can expand on this explanation by the fact that your web site hosting is done on your own dedicated servers. This means that you don't share the server with any other customer and it's completely dedicated to your company's needs. Best of all you don't need to buy any expensive equipment, we provide everything for you including the servers. If your online business is important to you then this is an important fact, because you want to be on dedicated servers that are unique to your needs and you don't have to worry about another customer taking up precious system resources, because it is completely dedicated to you.
Where we differ from many providers is we offer you a fully managed server. Some providers will offer you dedicated servers and charge you a monthly fee but you or someone at your company will need to have the technical expertise required to provide the system administration which can cost you a lot of time and money. With Intertune managing your servers you will save a lot of both.
Some common questions are answered below.
Who owns the equipment?
Any equipment and servers we provide for your solution is owned by us. In the event you ever wish to move your services you could purchase the servers you are using with us at fair market value. Also some clients like to buy their own servers and have us manage them. This is also possible and will save you some monthly costs with us.
What is Raid? What is Raid-1? What is Raid-5?
Raid stands for "Redundant Arrays of Independent Drives". Basically it means that there are extra hard drives in the servers that store your data and if one of the drives fail you have your data residing on other drives in the server that are exact copy of the failed drive, so you don't lose any data and your server is still accessible like nothing happened.
Raid-1 involes 2 mirrored hard drives. Each of the drives are exactly identical in size and data is written to both drives upon every single change and thus they contain exactly the same data.
Raid-5 involves 3 or more hard drives. Data is striped across multiple drives so that if any single drive fails the other drives will contain the data that the single failed drive had.
You don't need to memorize any of this, we will work with you and suggest what is right for your needs. Just rest assured your data will always reside on multiple drives on your server and will also be backed up to other servers so you will not have to be worried about losing your data.
What is bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is can occur between your servers and the rest of the Internet. Each of our managed server plans come with a certain amount of bandwidth included. If you exceed this it doesn't mean your web site or application will be inaccessible. It just means that you will be billed for the overage. Think of it like your mobile phone plan and the minutes you use every month.
What is a firewall?
A firewall is a piece of equipment that sits between the internet and your managed servers. It helps protect your servers by denying hackers access to unauthorized areas of your managed servers. At Intertune all of our managed servers come with firewall protection included.
How do you backup my data?
All of our managed server plans include nightly data backup onsite (to a backup server within the data center your managed server resides). We use state of the art tools to backup every single file on your managed servers. You also have the option to have your data backed up to an offsite backup server. This means that your data is actually transferred outside the data center your managed servers are located in, so in the event of a catastrophic event at the data center we have a copy of your data elsewhere.