There are very few hosting providers in Canada, if any, that take responsibility for the quality of service delivered to real-world end users. This is because hosting providers, even the ones that claim to offer fully managed services, don’t embrace the entire hosting solution stack (see diagram below). In particular, they tend to ignore the global services layer which is essential for managing the availability, performance, and security of a website through the Internet’s “middle-mile”, i.e. from the datacenter to your end user’s proverbial doorstep. As a result, organizations frequently discover that the fine print of their hosting provider’s Service Level Agreement leaves them helpless when end users complain about poor site performance.
The hosting provider’s position is simple. The Internet is beyond its control and, as a result, they cannot be responsible for end-user experience beyond the walls of their datacenter (and even that has caveats). Of course, this leads to a lot of confusion and finger pointing when end users complain. To make matters worse, the troubleshooting is typically left to the customer once the hosting company determines that its servers and network are performing normally. To close this gap in services and accountability between the datacenter and their end-users, organizations usually patch-up their managed hosting provider’s services with global routing, caching, and security services from a third-party. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal solution. The services and the SLAs between the two providers are not harmonized. Accountability for the quality of service actually delivered to end users remains divided and, thus, there is still no “one throat to choke” when things go sideways.
Carbon60 has been an Akamai partner for many years and works closely with them on opportunities in Canada. Its confidence in Akamai’s edge services is at the point where Carbon60 is now offering an umbrella SLA that includes Akamai’s services. As a result, it can assume full responsibility for the quality of its hosting service as experienced by its customers’ audiences. Moreover, customers can leverage Carbon60’s economies of scale, in-house professional services, and premium support agreement to maximize the return on their Akamai investment.
For more information about Carbon60’s end-to-end hosting solutions please email sales@carbon60.com or call us at 1-888-227-2666.
Founded in 1999, Carbon60 is a safe haven for private and public sector organizations in Canada that need a trusted partner to host their business-critical .NET, LAMP, and Java-based workloads. Carbon60 specializes in fully managed hosting solutions and embraces the entire hosting solution stack to deliver a higher level of reliability, performance, and security backed up by an end-to-end service level agreement.
