What's Behind FreeRun's Hosting Environment?

Staging Facility

We develop, test and obtain client approval for sites we develop at our staging facility in Napa, California. Our staging facility mirrors our production environment and provides the ability to fully test and review an internet offering prior to going "live".

Once a site or solution is approved we use custom code to push the site/solution to our co-location facility in Santa Clara.

Production Facility

Our production routers, web, mail and DNS servers all run the Red Hat Linux operating system. Linux provides unsurpassed robustness and security for our production environment. We build and maintain all our own servers to ensure maximum performance for our clients.

FreeRun Technologies, Inc has two dedicated and guaranteed 10 megabit per second (Mbps) connections to the Internet. This equates to the maximum throughput of more than twelve (12) T-1 lines available simultaneously. For this amazing amount of on-demand throughput, FreeRun uses AT& Communications. FreeRun's production servers are co-located at a state-of-the-art AT&T hosting facility in Silicon Valley.

We offer a multi-homed solution using our two dedicated connections and completely isolated paths from the ISP all the way to the servers. Each path has a dedicated router, firewall, dns server, cabling, ethernet switch and ethernet card. This approach minimizes the ability for a failure in any part of the to take our servers offline.

We run backups daily and use a modified "Tower of Hanoi" backup strategy. Production data is kept in three different physical systems. Rather than using tape, all data is kept on hard drives to minimize recovery time should a disaster occur.

Our premium hosting environment also offers automatic failover. If a web server should crash, the failover system automatically assumes the identity of the failed service.

Factors in our decision:

AT&T is a Tier 1 provider of scalable, high-performance Internet solutions for the corporate and commercial markets. They deliver an unsurpassed level of service and flexibility so that our customers' can best leverage Internet applications in their businesses.

AT&T was consistently rated by matrix.net as the top performing transit ISP during the two months that we evaluated server/service relocation options.

As an example, on Friday Oct 5, 2001 AT&T was the top performing provider in all three categories measured (100% reachability, 0% packet loss and 34.8 ms average latency across 293 different location across the world).