2012 Was the Hottest Year Ever: Is Your Business Prepared for More Extreme Weather and Disasters?

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Yesterday the National Climatic Data Center (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA) released U.S. weather data for 2012.

It was really hot. And it was extreme.

The year was, in fact, a full degree hotter than the next hottest year—ever. And 2012 had the second most extreme weather ever. There were 11 climate-related disasters that caused $1 billion or more in losses, including Sandy and Isaac.

While there is still some political debate about climate change, the scientific consensus is that the planet is warming and that this warming will trigger more and more extreme weather.

For that reason, more and more businesses are taking extreme weather into their business continuity and data recovery planning—because catastrophic weather can very easily lead to catastrophic business losses.

Cloud hosting and other virtualization services are inherently safer than having all your IT in-house and vulnerable to local weather and other extreme conditions. After superstorm Sandy, we were very happy to hear from customers like New Jersey-based Ciao Bella who reported that their EarthLink Cloud hosting services helped them remain fully operational and productive during and after the storm.

Our EarthLink Business and EarthLink Cloud divisions report that businesses contacting us about IT services are much more likely to require disaster recovery, business continuity, and data recovery services such as Cloud Server Backup as part of their product requirements.

In times of crisis, a company’s data is the asset most at risk and hardest to replace. So it’s time to prepare now, before your business becomes a victim of the extreme weather that is becoming more frequent.

Let our disaster recovery and business continuity consultants provide you with a customized disaster and data recovery solution.

Cloud Providers – Addressing Security Concerns

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Kris Scheetz

Cloud providers often get a bad rap; IT professionals sometimes see the cloud as an insecure means of having applications and data residing outside their own data centers. Security should absolutely be a concern whenever sensitive data is involved, and that concern can be heightened when considering cloud services that operate outside your corporate firewall. EarthLink Business wants you to be assured that these concerns are all taken care of with our services, and give you questions to ask while considering any provider.

Companies have been outsourcing services and technology for years. Just because companies may give up some control to the hosting provider when moving to a cloud environment, it does not mean they have to compromise on security. By asking the simple questions below, your company can build a trusting relationship with the cloud provider you are considering working with.

How is data encrypted when stored in the cloud infrastructure?
What logical and physical access controls are in place?
Is the cloud infrastructure fully redundant?
How well are cloud applications protected?

Ask these questions so you can understand the complexity of where your data may live. Consider only moving a couple less critical applications to the Cloud first, so you can start building that trusting relationship with the Cloud provider before deciding to go all in.

Also to help, The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a set of guidelines to help you manage security in the cloud. Use these guidelines to help compile a list of requirement questions before selecting a Cloud provider:

Carefully plan the security and privacy aspects of cloud computing solutions before implementing them.
Understand the public cloud computing environment offered by the cloud provider.
Ensure that a cloud computing solution—both cloud resources and cloud-based applications—satisfy organizational security and privacy requirements.
Maintain accountability over the privacy and security of data and applications implemented and deployed in public cloud computing environments.

The benefits of Cloud computing can help you cut IT infrastructure costs, provide new services to customers and streamline business processes, so don’t hesitate to take advantage due to security concerns. Contact your EarthLink representative today and start asking the right questions!

Web Hosting – 5 Popular Types of Hosting Explained

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

Before we get to all the different types of web hosting, let’s first answer the What is Web hosting question.

At its most basic, Web hosting is a service provided by a web hosting provider or web host, such as EarthLink Web Hosting, to store your website (HTML, images, and all other related files) on the host’s servers and make it available on the web. Beyond that, the scope of webhosting services can differ greatly from one provider to another.

Here are 5 common types of web hosting:

Free web hosting: EarthLink offers our dial-up, cable Internet, DSL Internet, and other Internet access members a small amount (10MB) of free web hosting space. It’s enough space to use for a small, personal website, but not a business website. It also comes without all the additional website marketing and other hosting features that are included with other EarthLink Web Hosting services. Free web sites are available at http://home.earthlink.net/~username rather than your own domain name.
Shared web hosting services: Shared web hosting is the most common type of commercial website hosting service, because it’s typically the least expensive kind of hosting that can offer all the features needed by businesses. With a shared hosting service, many customer websites are hosted on the same server at the hosting company. Unless a provider explicitly says a hosting service is dedicated hosting or some other type of hosting, the service is probably shared hosting (shared web hosting is also sometimes referred to as standard web hosting). The do-it-yourself web and ecommerce hosting plans and professional website design and hosting services offered on the earthlink.net website are shared hosting services. These are full-service plans offering domain names, business-class email, online marketing tools, and other popular web hosting features.
Ecommerce web hosting: Ecommerce web hosting is any form of web hosting (shared, dedicated, etc.) that allows the hosted website to offer secure online purchasing (with SSL encryption), usually via a shopping cart, and accept credit card transactions. EarthLink Web Hosting offers ecommerce hosting plans in both the build your own website and professional website design categories.
Cloud hosting: Cloud hosting offers remote virtual servers as a service. Cloud servers can be used for web hosting or other IT computing needs. Cloud hosting customers share a physical server at the cloud hosting company, but the physical server is divided up into virtual servers that are unique to each customer and are completely separate from each other. Each cloud web hosting customer would also have a unique IP address (not true with regular shared web hosting). Cloud hosting offers greater performance and much more control than shared hosting but is not as expensive as dedicated hosting. Cloud hosting can also be more reliable because cloud infrastructures include failover. This means that if the server your website is hosted on ever fails or encounters other problems, it can be almost instantly restarted on a different server. EarthLink offers cloud hosting services through our EarthLink Cloud division.
Dedicated web hosting: As the name implies, with dedicated web hosting a whole server is dedicated to one customer and is not shared in any way. A dedicated server is important for websites with extremely high traffic volumes and for business websites that demand increased server performance, the highest levels of security, and full control. EarthLink offers dedicated server hosting through our EarthLink Cloud division.

We hope that answers your questions. If there’s something you wanted to know that we left out, please leave your question below in the comments area. Thanks!

independenceIT Selects EarthLink for Virtualized Cloud Hosting, Reduces Annual Costs by 16%

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Pamela O'Connor

When fast-growing information technology services company independenceIT (iIT) chose EarthLink for virtualized Cloud Hosting services , we shared the news by issuing a press release and publishing a new iIT Case Study. EarthLink enables iIT to deliver Cloud Workspace™ and application platforms to their clients, improving the performance of its virtualized platform and allowing their internal IT team to focus efforts on development, support and enhancements rather than data center management. Utilizing EarthLink’s Cloud Hosting service, network infrastructure, and data centers frees iIT’s developers and systems engineers to bring new and enhanced solutions to market.

“With EarthLink Cloud Hosting, we eliminated the need to add infrastructure or engineering resources to scale our operations, while reducing our annual costs by an estimated 16 percent,” said Charles Buck, iIT Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “We’re able to keep our team very focused on profit-generating technology advancements, bringing new platform enhancements to market faster and keeping ahead of the competition while staying lean.”

To have such a leading-edge IT company select EarthLink is a huge vote of confidence in the reliability, performance and security of our solution. Two reasons cited in their decision were improved performance and the ability to more keenly dedicate its IT teams on development, support and enhancements rather than data center management.

Flexibility, scalability and an intense focus on customer care also gave iIT an appreciation of its EarthLink account team.

“We feel our products and platform are unique, and iIT truly appreciates the dedication, collaboration and customized approach that EarthLink provides. Any partnership comes down to people and execution. In the end, that’s what we bought with EarthLink, the out-of-the-box, flexible thinking and willingness to get it done,” shared Buck.

Earlier this year, EarthLink and independenceIT also signed an agreement enabling EarthLink to offer iIT’s Cloud Workspace solutions to customers as a part of EarthLink’s IT Services product suite. So this latest development further deepens our mutually-beneficial relationship and will greatly benefit customers of both companies.

Consider how EarthLink can help your overstretched IT team focus on priorities that improve your customer experience and bottom line rather than continual investments in hardware and engineering.

For the latest EarthLink updates, visit our press release page, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook and LinkedIn.