Interland Mends Shared Hosting

Slated to be introduced this week, blueHALO (high- availability load optimization) is designed to address reliability and security flaws in many shared hosting offerings, said Matt Molen, director of product marketing for Interland's hosting line. Such problems have burned solution providers employing shared hosting arrangements, he said.

"What has been happening is customers' sites go down because the service is unreliable, and it takes hours,even days,to get the sites back up. And the reseller has to answer to that," Molen said. "With our service, there are multiple Web servers so if one goes down, another one picks up the traffic. There is no noticeable downtime."

BlueHALO includes redundant firewalls to address security issues and redundant load balancers to guard against bottlenecks, according to Atlanta-based Interland. Multiple Web server arrays also keep a customer's site up even if the shared server fails. If a site does fail, the service includes duplicated NAS for data recovery and disk backup systems for all data.

BlueHALO also includes an automated monitoring tool that tracks account resources and allows solution providers to set usage thresholds and redirect traffic if one customer is using too many resources on the server. Another tool helps identify bad code introduced by the customer.

Interland backs the service with a 99.99 service-level agreement under which partners receive a violation fee if the service provider can't meet conditions of the agreement.

Interland targets the SMB market through its hosting offerings and 3,000 resellers, and blueHALO,starting at $16.95 a month,is priced to serve that space, solution providers say.

"My customers and I have been happy with Interland's service. They didn't have to make these improvements, but they did anyway, which makes us look good," said Kurt Allen Weis, owner of KW Productions, a Clifton, N.J.-based Web design and consulting firm. "They've been able to keep up with changing technology, while still keeping the price reasonable for small businesses."