tomp
02-07-2005, 11:42 PM
Introduction
Myriad Network offers cpanel (http://www.cpanel.net/) based reseller hosting (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/resellers/resellers.php) solutions. Our reseller hosting plans include the Fantastico (http://netenberg.com/fantastico.php) script library, Clam Antivirus (http://www.clamav.net/) email and file protection, Spam Assassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org/) spam filtering and a comphrensive list (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/resellers/plans/compare.php) of other sought after features.
Dare to compare
Does your provider detail the hardware it's using for its resellers servers?
Two areas we typically see other providers going 'cheap' is in both the memory (RAM) and hard drive departments.
Memory - Testing (http://www.crucial.com/library/server_memory_benchmark_tests.asp) commissioned by Crucial.com (http://www.crucial.com/) found that both data throughput and the number of Apache (http://www.apache.org/) HTTP (web) requests per second increased over 73% between a system with 512MB of memory and a system with 2GB of memory. When the amount of memory was increased from 2GB to 4GB the number of requests per second served by Apache was increased by an astounding 415%. When your business depends on the performance of your website Myriad Network's enterprise class servers with 4GB RAM standard is the clear choice.
** As of January 2007 we are using 6GB - 8GB of RAM in all hosting servers.
Hard Drives - In an effort to offer a lot of disk space at a low price, providers typically use lower performing and less reliable IDE and SATA based hard disk drives. These drives are typically rated at 50% (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/tip/0,294276,sid5_gci1001942_tax294586,00.html) the Mean Time Before Failure (http://www.answers.com/topic/mean-time-between-failures) (MTBF) of the enterprise proven SCSI drives Myriad Network uses. Additionally, some of these drives are only rated at an 8 hour (http://techreport.com/news_reply.x/3465) work day -- not 24x7 sustained operations.
These providers may or may not compliment this with a low cost (http://www.3ware.com/) RAID (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html) solution.
One industry expert (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/expertBio/0,294287,sid5_gci533832,00.html) states (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/askTheExpertsAnswer/0,294272,sid5_gci911330_tax294583,00.html) "Just to let you know that even though RAID is available on a much cheaper cost per megabyte using ATA and IDE disks, you get what you pay for."
Are you willing to trust your important data and livelyhood to a provider trying to cut corners and save a few dollars - at your expense?
At Myriad Network we take our hardware very seriously. You won't see any 'white box' systems, nor will you see workstation class machines filling the role of an enterprise server.
Is support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
Many companies 'claim' support is available. Give them a call in the early morning hours and see if a live person answers, then call us.
More importantly, when you email support do you receive a complete, comprehensive answer that you can understand? Email us, anytime at support .at. myriadnetwork.com.
Is the Service Level Agreement (http://looselycoupled.com/glossary/SLA) (SLA) available online (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php) in an easy to understand format?
Myriad Network provides (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php) a clear, easy to read SLA that is devoid of legal ease and double talk. Simple put, we guarantee your website or hosting solution will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If we fail to meet this we compensate you with a 1 day credit for every hour of downtime.
Does your company provide daily backups? Do they backup the data to a second hard disk on the same server or move it to a dedicated server?
We believe the best way to backup our customers data is to use secure, dedicated backup servers used exclusively to retain our customer’s important data. Consider a 'glitch' that affects the physical server and renders part or all the data on both hard drives inaccessible.
For many companies backups are an after thought, at best - something that doesn't get much attention.....until something goes wrong. Not only do we continue to invest in multi-terabyte dedicated backup equipment such as those sold by Coraid (http://www.coraid.com) and commercial backup software (http://www.r1soft.com) but we also regularly test our backups to ensure the data is consistent and available should you need it.
Does your hosting company charge you to restore a backup?
This seems a little absurd to us, but we've heard from customers that some companies (http://www.hostgator.com/restore.php) do. We don't.
Does your company offer 'open' customer forums for everyone to see?
Some companies close their forums. We ask why and so should you! At Myriad Network you can see every post (unedited) starting from the launch date of our forums in January of 2005.
Does your company pay you for referrals?
Myriad Network believes in rewarding (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/affiliates/affiliates.php) it's customers to referring friends, family and associates. We pay a generous $50 per referral regardless of the hosting solution selected. Even if you’re not a Myriad Network customer we will still pay you for referring new customers.
Is your company local to the hardware your website(s) is/are running on?
Sometimes remote hands and eyes aren’t enough. While some other companies are at the mercy of their datacenter or provider to affect repairs when something breaks we here at Myriad Network are local to the datacenter to maintain our servers and make repairs as needed. Consider a company (http://www.hostgator.com) based out of Florida that uses a datacenter (http://www.theplanet.com) in Texas. Who fixes the servers when something fails? Who's responsible for ensuring your website and critical data is back online as soon as possible? Who's responsible for ensuring the personnel working on the server can be trusted with your critical data?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. Is SSH access available?
A. http://my.myriadnetwork.com/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=2
Q. Are private name servers available?
A. Yes. You can either use our anonymous name servers or create your own.
Q. Can you transfer my accounts from an existing cpanel server?
A. Yes, we offer this service free of charge for up to 50 accounts. Additional accounts are $1/per account. Once you sign up you will be provided with the link to submit your accounts for transfer.
Q. So I'm going on a shared hosting server. Won't my websites get slower with every new account added?
A. Just like we monitor all of our servers to ensure they are working properly, we also monitor CPU and memory usage. As an example, should we see the CPU utilization at or above 10% for a 10 minute period or 10% averaged over a 24 hour period we stop adding accounts to that server to allow plenty of headroom for additional accounts.
Please do remember these are not typical shared servers used by other providers. Our reseller servers are enterprise Dell PowerEdge™ machines with:
- 2 x dual core 2.0 - 3.0Ghz Intel Xeon Processors
- 2 x 3.0Gbps SAS SCSI Drives (mirrored)
- dual power supplies
- 128MB/256MB RAID Controller
- Split Backplane (2 drives mirrored on one channel, additional drives mirrored on another channel for ultra performance.)
- 6GB - 8GB RAM
- dual 10/100/1000 network controllers
The additional RAM on the server allows us to dedicate 128MB - 2GB just to MySQL caching. The result is you’re frequently requested queries will typically reside in ultra fast memory and your website will display pages without delay.
Q. Is Fantastico available?
A. Yes. See the list of Fantastico installed scripts at http://netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php
Q. What version of cPanel/WHM do you typically run?
A. Typically the latest STABLE. Currently all servers are utilizing v10.x.
Q. Do you permit the installation of custom billing solutions to be used with my WHM/cPanel?
A. Yes, however we do not recommend the storing of credit card information online regardless if it's a shared or dedicated server.
Q. What is your SLA?
A. Our 100% uptime SLA is available for reading here - http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php)
Q. Will you provide technical support to my customers?
A. No. We provide support for our direct customers (resellers). You are responsible for supporting your clients. If an issue arises that you cannot resolve we are always happy to assist you.
Q. Do you backup our data?
A. Yes. We have dedicated, secure servers used exclusively for maintaining backups. We perform backups daily and maintain 14 days of backups onsite. We still strongly recommend you maintain an additional copy.
Q. Do you charge for restoring our data from backups?
A. No.
Q. Can I see the actual server status from within WHM?
A. Yes - we have nothing to hide.
Q. How much do additional IP addresses cost?
A. $1/mo per IP.
Q. How much is additional disk space?
A. $2.50/GB
Q. Can you customize a plan for me?
A. Possibly. Please email sales .at. myriadnetwork.com with your disk space and bandwidth requirements.
Q. What are the limitations of the reseller account?
A. The limitations are disk space, bandwidth and domains.
Q. What are the hidden charges you aren't telling us about?
A. Additional charges you will incur are solely because you asked for increased resources i.e. disk space, bandwidth, IP addresses etc.
Q. What is overselling?
A. Overselling is exactly what it sounds like - you sell more resources than are committed to your reseller plan. The total sum of all your accounts cannot exceed your allocation.
Q. Is overselling permitted?
A. Yes. You can divide your disk space and bandwidth up any way you choose. You, as the reseller are given an allotment of disk space and bandwidth. You can choose to give all or some of this to every resold (customer) account. The total sum of disk space and bandwidth in actual use cannot exceed your allocation.
Myriad Network offers cpanel (http://www.cpanel.net/) based reseller hosting (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/resellers/resellers.php) solutions. Our reseller hosting plans include the Fantastico (http://netenberg.com/fantastico.php) script library, Clam Antivirus (http://www.clamav.net/) email and file protection, Spam Assassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org/) spam filtering and a comphrensive list (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/resellers/plans/compare.php) of other sought after features.
Dare to compare
Does your provider detail the hardware it's using for its resellers servers?
Two areas we typically see other providers going 'cheap' is in both the memory (RAM) and hard drive departments.
Memory - Testing (http://www.crucial.com/library/server_memory_benchmark_tests.asp) commissioned by Crucial.com (http://www.crucial.com/) found that both data throughput and the number of Apache (http://www.apache.org/) HTTP (web) requests per second increased over 73% between a system with 512MB of memory and a system with 2GB of memory. When the amount of memory was increased from 2GB to 4GB the number of requests per second served by Apache was increased by an astounding 415%. When your business depends on the performance of your website Myriad Network's enterprise class servers with 4GB RAM standard is the clear choice.
** As of January 2007 we are using 6GB - 8GB of RAM in all hosting servers.
Hard Drives - In an effort to offer a lot of disk space at a low price, providers typically use lower performing and less reliable IDE and SATA based hard disk drives. These drives are typically rated at 50% (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/tip/0,294276,sid5_gci1001942_tax294586,00.html) the Mean Time Before Failure (http://www.answers.com/topic/mean-time-between-failures) (MTBF) of the enterprise proven SCSI drives Myriad Network uses. Additionally, some of these drives are only rated at an 8 hour (http://techreport.com/news_reply.x/3465) work day -- not 24x7 sustained operations.
These providers may or may not compliment this with a low cost (http://www.3ware.com/) RAID (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html) solution.
One industry expert (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/expertBio/0,294287,sid5_gci533832,00.html) states (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/infoCenter/askTheExpertsAnswer/0,294272,sid5_gci911330_tax294583,00.html) "Just to let you know that even though RAID is available on a much cheaper cost per megabyte using ATA and IDE disks, you get what you pay for."
Are you willing to trust your important data and livelyhood to a provider trying to cut corners and save a few dollars - at your expense?
At Myriad Network we take our hardware very seriously. You won't see any 'white box' systems, nor will you see workstation class machines filling the role of an enterprise server.
Is support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
Many companies 'claim' support is available. Give them a call in the early morning hours and see if a live person answers, then call us.
More importantly, when you email support do you receive a complete, comprehensive answer that you can understand? Email us, anytime at support .at. myriadnetwork.com.
Is the Service Level Agreement (http://looselycoupled.com/glossary/SLA) (SLA) available online (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php) in an easy to understand format?
Myriad Network provides (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php) a clear, easy to read SLA that is devoid of legal ease and double talk. Simple put, we guarantee your website or hosting solution will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If we fail to meet this we compensate you with a 1 day credit for every hour of downtime.
Does your company provide daily backups? Do they backup the data to a second hard disk on the same server or move it to a dedicated server?
We believe the best way to backup our customers data is to use secure, dedicated backup servers used exclusively to retain our customer’s important data. Consider a 'glitch' that affects the physical server and renders part or all the data on both hard drives inaccessible.
For many companies backups are an after thought, at best - something that doesn't get much attention.....until something goes wrong. Not only do we continue to invest in multi-terabyte dedicated backup equipment such as those sold by Coraid (http://www.coraid.com) and commercial backup software (http://www.r1soft.com) but we also regularly test our backups to ensure the data is consistent and available should you need it.
Does your hosting company charge you to restore a backup?
This seems a little absurd to us, but we've heard from customers that some companies (http://www.hostgator.com/restore.php) do. We don't.
Does your company offer 'open' customer forums for everyone to see?
Some companies close their forums. We ask why and so should you! At Myriad Network you can see every post (unedited) starting from the launch date of our forums in January of 2005.
Does your company pay you for referrals?
Myriad Network believes in rewarding (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/affiliates/affiliates.php) it's customers to referring friends, family and associates. We pay a generous $50 per referral regardless of the hosting solution selected. Even if you’re not a Myriad Network customer we will still pay you for referring new customers.
Is your company local to the hardware your website(s) is/are running on?
Sometimes remote hands and eyes aren’t enough. While some other companies are at the mercy of their datacenter or provider to affect repairs when something breaks we here at Myriad Network are local to the datacenter to maintain our servers and make repairs as needed. Consider a company (http://www.hostgator.com) based out of Florida that uses a datacenter (http://www.theplanet.com) in Texas. Who fixes the servers when something fails? Who's responsible for ensuring your website and critical data is back online as soon as possible? Who's responsible for ensuring the personnel working on the server can be trusted with your critical data?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. Is SSH access available?
A. http://my.myriadnetwork.com/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=2
Q. Are private name servers available?
A. Yes. You can either use our anonymous name servers or create your own.
Q. Can you transfer my accounts from an existing cpanel server?
A. Yes, we offer this service free of charge for up to 50 accounts. Additional accounts are $1/per account. Once you sign up you will be provided with the link to submit your accounts for transfer.
Q. So I'm going on a shared hosting server. Won't my websites get slower with every new account added?
A. Just like we monitor all of our servers to ensure they are working properly, we also monitor CPU and memory usage. As an example, should we see the CPU utilization at or above 10% for a 10 minute period or 10% averaged over a 24 hour period we stop adding accounts to that server to allow plenty of headroom for additional accounts.
Please do remember these are not typical shared servers used by other providers. Our reseller servers are enterprise Dell PowerEdge™ machines with:
- 2 x dual core 2.0 - 3.0Ghz Intel Xeon Processors
- 2 x 3.0Gbps SAS SCSI Drives (mirrored)
- dual power supplies
- 128MB/256MB RAID Controller
- Split Backplane (2 drives mirrored on one channel, additional drives mirrored on another channel for ultra performance.)
- 6GB - 8GB RAM
- dual 10/100/1000 network controllers
The additional RAM on the server allows us to dedicate 128MB - 2GB just to MySQL caching. The result is you’re frequently requested queries will typically reside in ultra fast memory and your website will display pages without delay.
Q. Is Fantastico available?
A. Yes. See the list of Fantastico installed scripts at http://netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php
Q. What version of cPanel/WHM do you typically run?
A. Typically the latest STABLE. Currently all servers are utilizing v10.x.
Q. Do you permit the installation of custom billing solutions to be used with my WHM/cPanel?
A. Yes, however we do not recommend the storing of credit card information online regardless if it's a shared or dedicated server.
Q. What is your SLA?
A. Our 100% uptime SLA is available for reading here - http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php (http://www.myriadnetwork.com/legal/sla.php)
Q. Will you provide technical support to my customers?
A. No. We provide support for our direct customers (resellers). You are responsible for supporting your clients. If an issue arises that you cannot resolve we are always happy to assist you.
Q. Do you backup our data?
A. Yes. We have dedicated, secure servers used exclusively for maintaining backups. We perform backups daily and maintain 14 days of backups onsite. We still strongly recommend you maintain an additional copy.
Q. Do you charge for restoring our data from backups?
A. No.
Q. Can I see the actual server status from within WHM?
A. Yes - we have nothing to hide.
Q. How much do additional IP addresses cost?
A. $1/mo per IP.
Q. How much is additional disk space?
A. $2.50/GB
Q. Can you customize a plan for me?
A. Possibly. Please email sales .at. myriadnetwork.com with your disk space and bandwidth requirements.
Q. What are the limitations of the reseller account?
A. The limitations are disk space, bandwidth and domains.
Q. What are the hidden charges you aren't telling us about?
A. Additional charges you will incur are solely because you asked for increased resources i.e. disk space, bandwidth, IP addresses etc.
Q. What is overselling?
A. Overselling is exactly what it sounds like - you sell more resources than are committed to your reseller plan. The total sum of all your accounts cannot exceed your allocation.
Q. Is overselling permitted?
A. Yes. You can divide your disk space and bandwidth up any way you choose. You, as the reseller are given an allotment of disk space and bandwidth. You can choose to give all or some of this to every resold (customer) account. The total sum of disk space and bandwidth in actual use cannot exceed your allocation.