Web Hosting

Most Sonic.net accounts include public webspace. This allows Sonic.net customers to publish personal and business content for the world to see. Through FTP and Shell access, customers can publish, edit, test, and refine their web content either locally on their computers or live on the Internet.

Infrastructure

Sonic.net web hosting uses multiple, fully-redundant servers that are configured identically. This provides two primary benefits:

• Load Distribution: with multiple servers, very high traffic loads have far less impact. This allows for fast pageloads and CGI functionality even when thousands of people are visiting your site.
• Reliability: in the event of hardware failure on a single system, the other systems will automatically "pick up the slack" and process web requests without interruption.

Many hosting providers will store a number of customers' websites on a single server. In the event that a single process ties up that single server's CPU, or a hardware problem (disk failure, power outage, etc.), all sites hosted on that server would be knocked offline. Multiple redundant, load-balanced servers makes a total outage phenomenally unlikely.

Disk Snapshots

Sonic.net maintains hourly and nightly "snapshots" of customer web directories. This provides a vital safety net during site updates, allowing a web publisher to quickly and accurately revert a page to a previous state. More information is available in the Snapshot Backups FAQ.

Scripting Environment

Sonic.net's web servers provide a number of resources for advanced web programming:

• Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)
• PHP version 4.4.8 (view current info)
• PHP version 5.2.6 available as CGI (view current info)
• Perl 5.6.1 (view current info)
• MySQL 4.1.16

Resources

A variety of tools and documents are available to assist in publishing and maintaining a site on the Sonic.net web servers. Please see http://www.sonic.net/web_resources/ for more detailed information.