LANSING – A 2013 study by Pingdom ? a reputable source monitoring website activity, worldwide – delivered some eye opening news for those interested in technology growth in Michigan. Surveying the world?s top one million most visited websites, Pingdom found that Lansing was hosting the 13th most of these sites, among all of the cities in the world.
To see a copy of the study, Pingdom.Com
For a list of the favorite websites, Click on Liquidweb.Com
This study represents a significant finding as it reflects the growing sentiment that Michigan is one of the safest, most efficient and reliable places to host a website. With factors to take into consideration such as network availability, weather, end-user location, latency and geographic redundancy, Liquid Web’s two major US hubs have proven to be atop the most popular amongst the world?s most illustrious data purveyors ? many of whom we are currently proud to be hosting. We expect this trend to continue as more online enterprises realize the value of location when choosing a web host.
The considerations the owner of a website takes into account when choosing a host often include the features of the datacenter where their enterprise will be hosted, however that datacenter’s physical location has become an increasingly popular item on many webmasters’ shopping lists. Liquid Web has gone to great lengths to ensure that its datacenters are built in Disaster Neutral areas. These hubs currently include the aforementioned Lansing, Michigan datacenters as well as an Arizona location to cater to customers who require geographic redundancy. This type of strategic positioning provides a strong foundation and, as we continue to expand, locating as far as possible from areas susceptible to natural disasters will always remain a key initiative.
Building our own datacenters has also allowed Liquid Web to engineer an extremely resilient and extensive fault tolerance system that has been developed to be immune to type of disasters that have plagued many popular providers that own or lease space in locations that are inefficient or ill-suited to hosting mission-critical data. The majority of large providers will tout failover systems and backup power sources, however Liquid Web?s facilities boast fault-tolerance built, not only across every layer, but in many physical locations. Investigating some of the most high profile outages in recent years reveals that many of the major providers at fault simply fell victim to multiple backup power sources being located in the same in the same area. If that area is subjected to damaging effects, multiple sources of backup power become useless. In addition to these measures, it is also important to regularly simulate disaster scenarios and ensure every single point in a system is up-to-date and functioning properly.
Another potential benefit Michigan may hold against its web hosting peers is its relatively cool northern climate. Datacenters contain many servers often operating at peak temperatures. The result is that cooling costs become a significant percentage of a web host’s overhead, leaving any maintaining datacenters with lower temperature control budgets in an advantageous position to keep pricing competitive with the market as a whole.
Often, the lessons gleaned by webmasters who have experienced downtime as the result of a major outage, include how it could have been prevented by considering the location(s) that their host maintains datacenters. The Pingdom study referenced above shows that more people are coming to this conclusion and actively seeking to locate in places like Michigan. As this trend continues, we remain happily headquartered in the Great Lakes State and eager to sing its praises.
