How reliable is BC?

System Reliability is non-issue because all of our Data Centers are located in Tier 4 Data Centre facilities. This means that all of the facilities that house our servers have:

• Multiple cooling and power distribution paths for stable systems
• Multiple active power distribution paths to prevent down time from blackouts
• Redundant components for fault tolerance
• High connectivity and power into our machines

All of our Data Center facilities are connected to the net via Tier 1 networks, or have peering arrangements with Tier 1 networks. This means that our servers are essentially hooked in to the "backbone" of the internet, which generally results in higher network speeds and lower latency from your customer's browser to our servers. And on top of all that we provide a 99.98% uptime service level agreement.

Where are your data centers located?

Business Catalyst operates data centers in 3 different continents to ensure our customers get optimum response times from their websites. Our data centers are located in:

• North America (New Jersey, USA)
• Europe (Dublin, Ireland)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney, Australia)

What about data management? Do you provide back ups?

Business Catalyst has a highly fault-tolerant server configuration in our data centers. For web and FTP servers, traffic is managed by a redundant pair of hardware load balancers, and in the event of a server failure, immediately and transparently distributed to the remaining servers in the pool. For database servers, there is instant failover to a mirror server for each database. Site assets (images, scripts, et cetera) are stored on NAS (Network Attached Storage) device with fault-tolerant disk configuration and redundant control units. Firewalls and other network hardware are also installed in redundant pairs for immediate failover in the case of malfunction. The data centers are also connected to the Internet through multiple links from different Internet service providers for added reliability.

All servers also have regular full and differential backups. However, it is important to note that recovery procedures cannot be initiated for individual file backups, as they are intended to perform 'full recovery' of the servers in the event of a hardware or software failure only.

At an individual site level, we provide several "backup" options for customers: you can use FTP to copy your web pages, templates, and layouts as often as you see fit. We also provide the Customer Report Generator to export all customer related information at your convenience. Another option for very complex sites would be to maintain a replica using our Notifications and Web Services API's. We do always suggest you retain a copy of your site's files and data locally, to protect from inadvertent file deletions in future by the site's users. To further assist, a comprehensive site backup and transfer tool – where you can download the BC site into an archive and be able to upload it again as a whole complete BC site – is on the long term roadmap. We do not have an ETA for this at present.