Premium Hosting Service

Future Medium offers autopublish and associated website developments through a premium fully-hosted environment at 'Rackspace Managed Hosting' in the USA.  Future Medium utilise highly trained onsite technicians in addition to remote administration which is carried out by our own team.  The Rackspace data centre is engineered to the highest levels, with extensive systems to address security and network redundancy, enabling Rackspace to offer 100% infrastructure availability guarantee.   The level of support, security, and availability of service is also matched by a competitive pricing structure.  This arrangement has been carefully selected to provide both Future Medium and customers of Future Medium with a cost effective and industrial strength solution.

Security

Access to data centres is restricted by two-factor authentication including Biometric hand scanners. Rackspace data centres are physically isolated from everyone but level three technicians. Public access is strictly forbidden. All entrances and common areas are monitored 24x7 via closed-circuit cameras.

Precision Environment

All air is circulated and filtered every 90 seconds to remove dust and contaminants. An advanced fire-suppression system is in place to prevent any fire from spreading - in the unlikely event that one could start. All cables to servers and routing equipment are securely tied down and cable racks suspended from the ceiling provide dual routes for all cables.

Conditioned Power

Power systems in Rackspace data centres are designed to run uninterrupted even in the unlikely event of a total power outage. All servers are fed with conditioned UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) power that will run if utility power fails. In the event of an extended power outage, on-site diesel generators can run indefinitely. Generators are regularly tested to ensure functionality in the event of an emergency.

Core Routing Equipment

Rackspace use only fully redundant, enterprise-class routing equipment housed in its own secure, core routing room and fed with its own redundant power supply. Data carriers enter the facilities at disparate access points to ensure that there is no service failure, even in the unlikely event of a data cable cut.

Backups

Website data is protected by a differential backup nightly and a full backup weekly.   Rackspace store 4 weeks worth of backups of live systems on behalf of Future Medium at any one time.  Data restoration processes have been tested and proven to be reliable and prompt.  In the unlikely event of a failure of our software systems the worst case scenario is that your website and data will be restored to the state it was the previous calendar day.

Test and Development environments

Future Medium utilise a number of development servers in-house.  These facilities are subject to a differential backup nightly and backups are routinely made to data-tape and then stored at a separate physical location weekly.  The test and development environments are located onsite for cost and accessibility reasons.  As they are not in an industrial data centre they do not have an uptime guarantee and may be subject to routine maintenance.

Statistics & Reporting software

Comprehensive statistics software, AWStats, is included within the autopublish CMS product for any site hosted on Future Medium's servers.  Short for Advanced Web Statistics, AWStats is a powerful open-source tool that generates advanced web server statistics graphically.

A full log analysis enables AWStats to show a vast amount of material including the following:

• Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
• Visits duration and last visits,
• Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,
• Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
• Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected),
• Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
• Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
• Files type,
• OS used (pages, hits, KB for each OS, 35 OS detected),
• Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, WAP, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 300 with library file with phone models details),
• Visits of robots (319 robots detected),
• Search engines, key phrases and keywords used to find your site (The 115 most famous search engines are detected like Yahoo, Google, Altavista, etc...),
• Other personalised reports based on URL, URL parameters, referrer field for miscellaneous/marketing purpose,
• Number of times your site is "added to favourites bookmarks".
• Ratio of Browsers with support of: Java, Flash, RealG2 reader, Quicktime reader, WMA reader, PDF reader