Since many of you still need more information on our datacenter, I decided to write an article only about this.

Being Terremark’s flagship facility, the “NAP of the Americas” is one of the largest, most significant network projects all over the World. And it’s right here, in Miami, FL

 “ The NAP of the Americas® provides you with a secure, reliable carrier-neutral facility with direct backbone access to the world’s major carriers. Via this massive connectivity, Terremark can deliver to millions of businesses and consumers virtually anywhere in the world any available service from any network service provider in the world. “

Source: Terremark’s Corporate WebSite

Strategic Location
Miami has been ranked as one of the top-five best interconnected cities in the world, ahead of San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Terremark’s NAP of the Americas makes Miami the only city in the U.S. where Optical, Ethernet, MPLS, Voice and Internet traffic is handed off in a single location.

NAP of the Americas is located in downtown, Miami, an area that has numerous telecommunications carrier facilities, fiber loops, international cable landings and multiple power grids. The convergence of telecommunications infrastructure is why global carriers, ISPs and other Internet-related businesses, educational institutions, and enterprises have chosen to become customers of NAP of the Americas.

Switching the majority of South America, Central America and the Caribbean’s layer-1, layer-2 and layer-3 traffic bound to more than 148 countries in the world, NAP of the Americas makes it the unrivaled gateway to the Americas.

Connectivity Model
Terremark’s Connectivity Model is second-to-none. As a neutral provider of interconnection services, we have every major global network in our facilities exchanging traffic. Currently, seven Tier 1 service providers provide us with our upstream access to the global Internet. This gives us unparalleled routing table access and multi-homing capabilities. Terremark requires these service providers to have at least OC-48 capacity to maintain connectivity to our network. With such a wide selection of backbones in our facilities, we are then able to provide heightened performance and quickly add virtually any approved carrier required by our downstream clients. Terremark continuously tests each backbone provider for latency performance statistics and compares them to client requirements to ensure SLA compliance.

“ Terremark delivers our Managed Router Service with a guaranteed SLA uptime of 99.999% over any given calendar month. Our MRS platform connects to the upstream service providers via a pair of fully-redundant routers with average latency of less than 15 microseconds. Our MRS platform resides within the same facilities as our upstream service providers, thus enabling maximum redundancy in carrier interconnection.“

 Source: Terremark’s Corporate WebSite

Physical Security

The NAP of the Americas has a centrally-located Command Center manned by security personnel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Security personnel monitor all security cameras, guard building entrance and exit access points, and control key card access to elevators, floors and roof areas. In addition, environmental sensors notify tenants and mobilize rescue in case of emergency.

Structurally, the NAP of the Americas is designed to withstand natural disasters and includes strategic features such as:

• The second floor, where the NAP of the Americas resides, is 32 feet above sea level. The ground level of the building is 14 feet above sea level.
• The state-of-the-art lightning prevention system works in a radius of 300 feet to detract strikes by discharging a static electricity flare.
• Roof slope designed to aid in drainage of floodwater in excess of 100-year storm intensity assisted by 18 rooftop drains
• The building is designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane with 12 million pounds of roof ballast.
• 12 Million pounds of concrete for roof ballast.
• 7′ thick solid concrete exterior panels.
• The building is outside FEMA 500-year designated flood zone.
• The building is outside the Miami-Dade hurricane evacuation zone.

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These are just a few highlights that I took directly from their website.
More info can also be found at http://www.appliedi.net/network/.

All our shared/reseller hosting servers are currently hosted on this Datacenter.
As part of our “security reserve” we also have space at the Telefonica’s US Datacenter

Needless to say, we have 24/7×365 access to both locations, so troubleshooting a major issue would never be a real problem for us. We’re just a few minutes away.

Sources: Terremark.com & Appliedi.net

As an aspdotnetstorefront hosting partner and company that is widely regarded for the quality of aspdotnetstorefront hosting we provide we’re often contacted by aspdotnetstorefront website owners hosted elsewhere. Recently, we’ve noticed an increased number of new aspdotnetstorefront website owners contacting us about the performance of their own aspdotnetstorefront store and wondering why the aspdotnetstorefront stores we host seem to out perform their own site. More often than not the question is something like this:

“When I first load my aspdotnetstorefront store it’s very slow to load but then after a couple page loads it’s much faster and very responsive. What gives?”

Usually, the store owner immediately assumes it’s their designer, their developer or even the code because the rest of their website loads fine so it can’t be the host.

Often the host will further complicate the confusion by saying things like “No, you must have a memory leak because your site is using ALOT of memory” or “No our servers are fine, look at these sites they all load fast”. Although these things can happen we usually find they are not the culprit.

Why’s my aspdotnetstorefront site slow on the first load? Is it the code?

So then why is my aspdotnetstorefront store slow? Is is the code? Yes it’s the code! But it’s not the aspdotnetstorefront code! It’s actually the .NET framework or ASP.NET. When an ASP.NET site is called for the first time it’s compiled and then executed. While it’s getting compiled the page is going to load very slowly but then once compiled it will load extremely fast. This is usually the initial slow down you see when you visit any ASP.NET based site that’s been inactive or is just being visited for the first now. So this issue is NOT an aspdotnetstorefront issue but instead a shortcoming of the .NET framework.

Now, once the application is compiled, this compiled copy is then cached on the server so any subsequent requests will be VERY fast. If however the site isn’t very active or goes through a period of inactivity the server will see that the compiled code is taking up resources that could be used elsewhere so it will release that memory and make it available to the other applications running on the server. So the very next time your site (or web application) is executed it will need to compile all over again and you’ll experience that same slow down once again.

Can I avoid this slow down caused by the site going inactive?

So how can I avoid this? Many clients that don’t have very active sites and have clients that are sensitive to the slow down will find a clever workaround. They workaround this by setting up with a website monitoring service that will access their site on a given interval and pull one of the web pages to verify the site is online.

This causes the site to compile or remain compiled and has the benefit that now your site will be quick for everyone accessing it. The downside to this is that the site will be consuming memory even when it’s not in use and also CPU each time it’s compiled.

But my site goes really slow when people are surfing it or checking out?

Today it’s no secret about ASP.NET being compiled on the first execution and the slowdown it causes as many have become used to it. In fact with ASP.NET 2.0 you can even get around this sometimes by using pre-compiled binaries.

A bigger problem is when your site visitors start to complain that during a visit to your website while going from one page to another the site suddenly becomes unresponsive. Even worse is when during checkout their cart errors out or is suddenly empty! So what gives?

In this case it’s both the host and the site compiling! This is most often the result of the application pool your site is hosted in recycling. You see, in IIS6 each site is generally isolated in it’s own application pool, this is for security and stability. If one site starts to act up (or crash) it will only crash those sites in the same application pool as itself. So if every site is in it’s own application pool (the way we do it at appliedi.net) then your site is less likely to be affected by other sites on the same server.

So Why do dedicated application pools matter?

Think about it this way. Your e-commerce site is probably a major part of your store’s revenue and when it’s down you’re not earning any money. Now in a classic shared hosting account where many sites share a single application pool if one of the sites in that pool were to crash, then it goes down and takes the rest of the sites in the application pool down with it.

If your site is in it’s own dedicated application pool then when those other sites start crashing your site will remain online and responsive.

Great shouldn’t every host do it this way?

Yes, every host should do dedicated application pools, but they don’t. You see, for the discount hosting providers, the bargain hosters or the monster marketing hosts (like the guys you see ads for during the superbowl) they’re concerned about getting the best bang for their buck. Since their hosting is generally very inexpensive they find ways to get as many sites as possible hosted on each webserver. So by using shared application pools they’re often able to get many more sites per server.

Dedicated application pools result in better security (each app pool runs as a unique user so no two app pools can share or see each other’s data) and better stability (obviously) but the downside to this is that you use more memory on each server and aren’t able to get as many sites per physical server.

But I’m in a dedicated app pool and my app pool recycles all the time!

Now many of today’s hosting providers (including the cheap hosting guys) are moving to dedicated application pools for security and stability. In fact, they proudly let you know that you’re in a dedicated application pool. Some hosts even provide little application pool monitoring tools so you can see when your application pool recycles.

You’re probably finding that your application pool is recycling frequently and each time it recycles your site has to compile again.

For an e-commerce site this means not only did your client just suffer a lost cart but now they have to sit there and watch the progress bar spin until your site comes up again so they can start all over!!!

The problem is more than likely that your host has a very restrictive memory limit and although it’s fine for many simple applications or less active websites, for today’s advanced web application like aspdotnetstorefront, it’s just not enough. These hosts usually restrict your application pool between 75MB to 120MB of memory with 100MB being pretty typical.

Most of today’s advanced web applications (like aspdotnetstorefront, bvcommerce, dotnetnuke, kentico, communityserver, etc) need between 100MB to 150MB on average and can grow to require much more.

So if you find that your application pool is recycling frequently (say when you have more than just a couple site visitors or more than a handful of products) then it’s most likely that the memory limit is being reached and the server is automatically recycling the application pool to keep the memory usage in check.

Does AppliedI set an application pool limit then?

Yes we do set an application pool memory. We do this because the shared hosting servers are shared servers and these resources need to be shared among multiple sites.

The memory pool limits range between 100MB (such as on our valueplus plan) to our VS-3 semi-dedicated hosting plan which is set at 500MB of memory. These limits are of course monitored as well as the websites running in them to make sure they provide adequate resources for today’s websites. As the needs of web applications continue to grow these memory limits too will continue to grow.

So what do I need for my aspdotnetstorefront store?

So now that you know your site is probably recycling because of it reaching a memory limit you’re probably wondering how much memory your application needs?

We see on the average website application pool running aspdotnetstorefront store is anywhere between 120-140MB of memory.

We set the VS-1 (our recommended aspdotnetstorefront plan which includes 250MB of SQL, the ability to run your own SSL certificate and all the features you need for an aspdotnetstorefront store from just $22.96/month) at 175MB of memory which is more than enough for the majority of today’s advanced web applications.

What happens as my aspdotnetstorefront store grows? Can I continue to grow?

Absolutely! Applied Innovations core business is built around providing the hosting infrastructure your business needs to grow and facilitating that growth. This is why we call our hosting customers our “E-Business Partners” and our slogan is “Empowering Successful E-Businesses” because we provide the tools and technologies you need to not only grow your business but to succeed in your industry. We provide several shared hosting plans to help you grow gradually as well as virtual private servers and managed dedicated hosting services for when your site really starts to take off!

We found that website owners state one of the most difficult things for a website owner is having to switch hosting companies, you don’t know who to go to and you’ve probably built a relationship with your previous host that you really don’t want to switch hosting providers and as your E-Business partner we understand this and are here to help you grow.

So that’s why AppliedI.net is the leading aspdotnetstorefront hosting provider?

That’s not why but it’s certainly part of our secret sauce recipe. It’s not special coupon codes or clever marketing. Applied Innovations is a web application hosting provider that caters to growing businesses like yours and provides a series of services and product offerings that facilitate the growth and success of your business.

This does lead me to ask one question though?

So that’s the story on why your aspdotnetstorefront or for that matter any asp.net application is probably responding slowly and what Applied Innovations does to keep this from being a factor. I do however have one question for you, Why if your business ( and most likely your very livelihood) relies on your website, then why oh why did you try to skimp on your hosting service?

Last week, Carlos Caneja and Jess Coburn, representing Applied Innovations, attended HostingCon 2007 in Chicago, IL at the Chicago Navy Pier.  HostingCon 2007, the 3rd HostingCon event, brought together almost 100 vendors exhibiting products geared towards hosting and Internet and more than 1200 webhosters and 100s of informational and training sessions.

For Applied Innovations, attendance at HostingCon is considered almost mandatory as this we have attended every HostingCon to date.  For AppliedI, HostingCon represents an opportunity to meet in person with the vendors we rely on to power our business as well as to learn about new and exciting technologies and of course make new vendor and peer relationships.  In the end, attending HostingCon is just an example of our commitment to providing best in class Windows Hosting.  It’s through attending events like HostingCon and then bringing this information back, implementing these new ideas and also providing this information to you, our e-business partners, that we continue to establish ourselves as a leader in web hosting.

Some of the vendors we met with.

At this year’s HostingCon we met with the likes of Microsoft, SWsoft, WebHostAutomation, ScanAlert, Smartertools and others. Some of the vendors we met with and some of the information discussed is shown below

The SmarterGuys from SmarterTools

The guys from SmarterTools were Tim Uzzanti (Number 2 from the left) and Jeff Hardy. With SmarterTools we discussed the anti-spam improvements and collaboration improvements made within SmarterMail and also discussed the upcoming new features that will make it even more effective against SPAM as well bring new features to make organizations able to share information in an easier and more powerful manner.  We also discussed the new changes being made to SmarterTicket and enhances expected in SmarterStats. It’s clear they’re very busy making great software even greater.  Today SmarterMail powers almost all of our mail servers and SmarterStats is the web analytics application of choice.

The guys from Microsoft

In the first picture is Tito Leverette and in the second picture is Brett Hill. Tito is a Microsoft Hosting Technologist/Evangelist and he’s pretty much our point man at Microsoft for any technical questions we may have.

Brett Hill has been instrumental in our launch of IIS7 hosting and has helped us begin to craft what will become the next generation of Windows Hosting here at Applied Innovations.

WebHostAutomation the guys that power Helm

 Pictured here in the HELM4 booth is Chris Danks from WebHostAutomation. Their CEO Mark Hall and CTO Adam Saunders were also on site but available when we were snapping photos.

Today, HELM powers our windows shared hosting, asp.net reseller hosting and much of our dedicated hosting network and we have some very exciting plans in store with HELM4 and enjoyed the opportunity to meet in person with WHA to discuss our future plans. We’re really excited with the direction HELM has taken and the new modular architecture that it sports.

SWsoft the makers of Plesk, Virtuozzo and leading Hosting Vendor

SWsoft is one of the top hosting automation vendors in the hosting industry if not the leading technology company. SWsoft makes Plesk, Virtuozzo, Parallels are sister companies with Acronis and many more. SWsoft’s Virtuozzo and Plesk powers our Windows VPS Hosting offering and their sitebuilder product is used as our sitebuilder solution.

With SWsoft we talked about Virtuozzo 4.0 and the new high availability features it will offer when released.

Pictured are Mike Riolo, Director of Hosting Sales and Marco Crivelli from the Hosting Sales division. SWsoft probably had one of the strongest presences at HostingCon with all their top executives on staff meeting with hosts and attending the conference sessions.

The guys that keep the Internet Hacker Safe

I know the name is a bit misleading considering what they do is actually keep your website safe against hackers, but I couldn’t resist.  That’s Michael Ayers from ScanAlert. ScanAlert is our partner for PCI scanning and website vulnerability detection. ScanAlert offers all of our customers one year free PCI scanning.

It’s more than just meeting Vendors

A big part of any conference is of course networking with vendors and hosting peers but it’s also about learning about the new technologies and how to utilize these technologies to provide a higher level of service and customer satisfaction. This year was no exception and in the coming months you’ll see us announcing many new changes and partnerships all to make your hosting experience with Applied Innovations the best available.  Some of the new partnerships we’ll be announcing in the coming months are with Pinnaclecart and CRE Loaded Ecommerce and much more. I really don’t want to announce more just yet but expect to see a lot of great stuff coming as a result of our time at HostingCon.

Since we first pre-launched the AppliedI blog (all of last week) and introduced it to a handful of customers we’ve had a few questions about the blog and the platform we’re using. This post will hopefully address those questions.

What server platform and blog engine are you using and why?

Our blog is currently hosted on a Windows 2003 server running IIS6 (like 90% of the rest of our network).  There are many outstanding blogging engines available today and some of the most popular are:  Community Server, Sharepoint, dasBlog, subText, MoveableType, Wordpress and Drupal

to name a few. We opted to use Wordpress for several reasons which we’ll address later. This isn’t saying Wordpress is the best blogging engine available and that you should drop whatever engine you use today and move to wordpress but it definitely demonstrates that wordpress is a viable blogging solution on Windows.

Wordpress uses PHP as the script engine and MySQL as the database. Windows, IIS, MySQL and PHP are often referred to as WIMP!

Why Wordpress?

There is a very large community that has adopted wordpress. In fact wordpress is probably one of the most widely used blog engines available. The large number of plugins, enhancements, hacks and themes available for wordpress made it a clear choice.

One of our favorite features built into wordpress is the Akismet comment spam filter. Comment spam is when someone comes along and posts a comment in your blog for the sole purpose of creating links from your site to their site. This causes the search engines to believe your site and their site are somehow related and may have adverse affects on your own website’s search engine ranking.  The AppliedI.net is a very recognized and linked to website and as such is a definite target for comment spammers and Akismet was one of the deciding factors to use Wordpress. Many other blogging platforms support Akismet including dasBlog.

What features in Wordpress are you using?

Today we have the following features implemented in our wordpress blog:

• Akismet for comment spam
• aLinks to provide automatic keyword linking
• FeedBurner Feedsmith to manage feed subscriptions
• Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag posts
• Translate to provide translations in various languages
• WP lightbox 2 to provide that ever so cool image popup feature
• Wordpress Widgets
• Dean Lee’s permalinks ISAPI filter to provide search engine friendly text links

The theme we’re currently using is called GlossyBlue but we have a custom theme in the works.

The Internet has had a profound affect on how we communicate as a society. Today, everyone agrees that e-mail is not just a clever novelty but has become a major component into our livelihoods, both on a professional and a personal level. Much like e-mail developed over the years blogging is also developing and becoming a staple in our daily lives. We hope the AppliedI blog follows along the path of the other great blogs on the Internet and creates a new channel of communication, education and sharing between you, our e-business partner and us, your webhosting provider.

What is a blog?

From wikipedia:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

What will I find here?

We hope the AppliedI.net blog will become a new source of information for you to learn about the latest news and happenings within Applied Innovations. This blog will be used to announce new services, new features and enhancements to your hosting services. The blog will be used to provide you cutting edge information on the latest web technologies.

[tags] appliedi.net, blog, appliedi blog[/tags]