Integrated Services
A complete, integrated hosting package.
Our approach to hosting starts with finding a Dedicated Server that fits your business. We also provide Colocation space for those with even more specialized hardware requirements. A balance of performance, reliability, compatibility and price is paramount to us.
Our customers can also leverage our shared services to improve their page load times, maintain their uptime, grow fast, or even just to save money. Our integrated shared services currently include: Anycast DNS, Remote Backup Service, Load Balancers, and Firewalls.
In our experience these are the services that are the core of a well-run Internet site. They also benefit from specialized hardware, server redundancy and being present in multiple datacentres - which often puts them out of reach for a mid-size business. We've purpose built these services to integrate with our portal, each other and your dedicated server.
This single sourced, integrated approach means we are a dependable point of contact for your Internet hosting, and with direct Tier 3 support, you will never need to escalate.
Astute Hosting has been there for our company since we launched. During this time, we have received near-instant replies to all emails, and prompt, proactive support whenever anything was needed. We have the highest level of trust for Astute's team because they have proven time and time again that they share our interest in ensuring the availability of our equipment to clients.Steve Steffler
Spout Communications
Dedicated Servers
As a premium dedicated hosting provider specializing in Linux hosting and FreeBSD hosting, we offer bare metal hosting, which allows for fast local storage and no performance hit for virtualization. Combine these features with our secure and fully dedicated VLANs and our expert Tier 3 technical support, Astute’s bare metal servers are perfect for businesses of any size looking to optimize their online performance.
- Latest generation of Intel microarchitetures and chipsets.
- High quality, power efficient Supermicro hardware minimizes hardware failures and maximizes data centre capacity, while minimizing the impact on the environment.
- Flexible and customizable hardware configurations ensure the most efficient use of your hardware resources.
- IPMI2.0/KVM over IP gives you full out-of-band control of your hardware, including the ability to go into the BIOS and re-install the operating system yourself.
- 100% Network and Power Uptime SLA, 2 Hour Hardware Replacement SLA.
- Locations include: Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, and Miami.
Colocation
For businesses that need their own hardware, we can provide rackspace in several of our data centers around our global network. Our colocation services can provide you with the necessary space, power and bandwidth for your specialized Internet infrastructure needs in our mission-critical environment.
Network
Depending on the location of your users you may have different network requirements. We offer two different networks. Our value network (ASN 63213) focuses on the US, whereas the premium network (ASN 54527) has full canadian and US routing.
- Premium Network Upstreams: Level3, Cogeco Peer1, Shaw, Tinet
- Value Network Upstreams: Cogent, Hurricane Electric, Tinet
- Full VRRP between redundant distribution switches
- Multi-homed BGP network with upstream transits
Anycast DNS
Utilize our globally distributed Anycast DNS servers to increase the online performance of your business. We take advantage of our premium network peering to have domain name requests answered by the nearest of our distributed servers. Having an integrated health monitoring system also means our DNS infrastructure can globally distribute and failover our clients’ server loads intelligently. See? Our Anycast DNS is fast and smart.
- Record changes are streamed to redundant databases in each location.
- Zone transfers from third-party servers.
- No forced time-to-live minimum.
- 10 second polling for ICMP, TCP, or SNMP based health checks from multiple locations.
- Uses PowerDNS Authoritative Server with PostgreSQL as the backend database.
- Locations include: Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, and Miami.
Backup Services
Use our backup services to protect all your critical data. Our servers use the advanced ZFS file system to ensure data integrity, storage efficiency, and backup snapshots for long-term availability of backups from multiple points in time. Additional off-site backup servers can be used for further, geographical redundancy. With our two tiered system, you can be sure our backup services will be there for you in the worst of times.
- Uses ZFS, the most advanced file system in production use today.
- Block level data integrity checksums and de-duplication.
- Fully accessible snapshots allow you to browse through and download files from any scheduled backup throughout the history of your data.
- Available in multiple locations, allowing for geographical redundancy in case of natural disasters or regional outages.
Load Balancing
Integrated in our hosting is our load balancing services. Based on IP implementations, our load balancing technology works for almost any application and ensures minimal response time. Moreover, by programming our system for persistent connections, a given source of information is directed to the same destination node every time. So, whether its HTTPS load balancing or layer 3/4/7 load balancing, our hosting network is fast, reliable, and powerful.
- IP, transport, and application layer based load balancing.
- ICMP, TCP, and HTTP(S) based health checks.
- Round-robin distribution to destination nodes.
Secure Firewall
As part of our integrated hosting, we provide fully redundant stateful firewalls that synchronize states across multiple firewalls so that TCP connections stay established, even in the event of failover. We also use TCP SYN proxies to help mitigate against SYN-based and other types of attacks. Moreover, our OpenBSD PF system provides connection rate-limiting to automatically deny access to malicious requests so your servers can focus on legitimate traffic.
- Running the OpenBSD operating system, hands-down the best security track record of any platform, either server or appliance based.
- Fully redundant with synchronized states, keeping TCP connections up even in the event of failover.
- TCP SYN Proxy and connection rate-limiting can provide automated protection against flood-based attacks.
Connecting to our hosting network is as easy as providing us with a little bit of information. So type away! We’d love to hear from you!