RackShare provides you a share of the rack, high-quality web and mail application hosting and support, freeing you to concentrate on your web presence and your business.

Whether you're a web consultant or designer, a small business looking to create or expand your web presence, or an experienced corporate webmaster, RackShare can provide you with easy-to-use, fully supported solutions to grow and manage your Website.

We understand that your primary focus is to serve the needs of your customers by building your web presence and managing your business, not to spend hours wrestling with the particular configuration of your web hosting company's virtual web servers.

What is a Rack?

A rack, according to the dictionary, is a framework for holding things. In the Internet world, a rack is usually a framework for holding computers.

Racks can contain as few as one computer, such as a large enterprise server, or they can contain many smaller computers such as dedicated web servers.

A dedicated server can cost thousands of dollars to purchase, thousands of dollars a month and many hours of labor to maintain. If you'd rather spend your resources growing your business than wrestling with server expense and maintenance time, then RackShare is for you.

What is a Data Center?

A Data Center is filled with racks. Many computers are located on the rack, and many racks fill the room. A Data Center is usually operated by a networking company such as MCI or Sprint or UUNET, or by smaller companies such as national, regional, and local ISPs.

A central feature of a Data Center is connectivity, the connections between a Data Center and the rest of the Internet. Neary all Data Centers - the only ones worth talking about, actually - have redundant connections to the Internet. The Center might have T-3 connections to Sprint and UUNET, for example. A T-3 is more than 700 times the speed of your 56K modem connection, which ensures that when a visitor comes to your web site and requests a page, it is delivered as fast as possible.

Security

Data Centers typically ensure physical security of the Data Center by providing secured access to the location itself, as well as security of the networking equipment the Center relies on.

Reliability

Reliability is provided by backup electrical equipment and heating and cooling systems. Fire protection is also essential to maintaining a reliable Data Center.

Redundancy

In addition to multiple connections to the Internet backbone, a Data Center may also be linked to various peering points. A peering point is an exchange point, a place where peers exchange data. For example, if one local ISP and another in the same town connect to each other for the purposes of providing faster access to each other's customers, the two ISPs are engaged in peering, specifically a type of peering known as private peering.

Larger Data Centers may peer with many companies. A regional ISP for example, might peer with UUNET and AOL, thus ensuring that their client's web sites are quickly accessible by AOL users in addition to providing their own users with faster access to AOL-hosted information.