We have over 300 active websites and more than 22 000 active mail users on our servers.

How do we ensure you get what you pay for:

Power outages:
An 11kV power supply from the municipal power utility energises a fault-tolerant, medium-voltage ring that powers two separate low-voltage 2MVA energy centres. These A- and B feeds power mission-critical infrastructure such as IT load, air conditioning, security systems and emergency lighting. They provide seamless electrical failover with their own emergency backup power systems in the event of a power failure.

We have on-site fuel storage sufficient to run our generators for  7 days’ continuously. Our UPS’s provide always-on power, with battery standby time of 30 minutes.

Connectivity:
Our network is multi-homed with multiple uplinks per data centre via at least two Tier 1 upstream providers and peering partners. Should a network failure occur, traffic is automatically rerouted via alternate uplinks, significantly increasing our network resilience.

Connectivity is provided through diverse, redundant fibre routes connecting the facility to a 10Gbps fibre ring.

Network security:
Network level security consists of three main components:

• DDoS mitigation
• VLAN reverse path forwarding protection
• Juniper firewall rules at the network edge and core

DDoS mitigation:
A DDoS detection and mitigation system is deployed in both the Cape Town and Samrand data-centres. DDoS attack traffic is diverted to a filter/scrubbing server that can distinguish between valid and malicious traffic. Malicious traffic is scrubbed off while valid traffic is re-injected into the network. The victim IP is not affected during the DDoS attack. DDoS detection and mitigation is fully automated and traffic diversion occurs automatically.

Small DDoS attacks are scrubbed locally in the data-centre by the mitigation system. For larger attacks, traffic is diverted to an international DDoS mitigation provider which then sends the clear traffic on to South Africa.

VLAN Reverse path forwarding protection:
Reverse path forwarding protection is enabled for all VLANs in our data centres. This policy ensures that only the subnets allocated to a VLAN can generate traffic for that VLAN. This helps to mitigate two kinds of malicious traffic:

• Source-spoofed traffic where a host is sending out traffic for subnets that do not belong to the VLAN.
• Inter-VLAN subnet spoofing, where a host in one VLAN uses IP addresses from another VLAN using source-spoofing.

Backups:
Our Servers are automatically backed up in the early hours of the morning. The backup includes all critical data required for disaster recovery.

Backups are made of the user’s home directory as well as databases. The user’s home directory will include site content, web logs and any mail that was on the server at the time that backup was completed.

We can restore up to the previous 2 weeks of backup data. Please note that we do not guarantee backups. If you have critical data which you cannot afford to lose in the event of a disaster, keep a copy of your data locally (or at an alternate location) as well. Logs (such as FTP, web server and mail logs) are normally kept for 60 days.

Due to the large scale of our Web hosting environment, our backup and restore process is effectively tested on a daily basis.

Mail security:
SSL is used for POP, IMAP and SMTP protocols for email, resulting in data encryption between our server and customers’ mail programmes.

The use of strong passwords is enforced when creating or editing mailboxes for our clients.

The following measures are used to mitigate spam and malware:

• Anti-virus and anti-spam scanning occur on all inbound and outbound email.
• Common malicious file extensions are blocked for both inbound and outbound email.
• Known malicious IP addresses are blocked by our firewall for incoming email.