Ability SmartSite™ - Ecommerce Hosting

A lot of companies offer hosting - how do you know which one to choose?

Ability Commerce makes it easy with full-service hosting for your Ability SmartSite™. Our hosting is dedicated to ecommerce, with all the technical requirements you need for a robust, feature-rich website. This includes a Data Center which meets and exceeds your web-site's high-availability requirements.

Additionally, you have one, central point of contact for both your website and hosting. We have staff experts who know how both our software and servers work. If there is ever a problem, we will resolve it quickly, without unproductive "finger pointing" or calls to multiple vendors.

What about "bargain" hosting? As with everything else, the old saying, "you get what you pay for" rings true. Ecommerce sites, especially those that are feature-rich (like Ability SmartSite,) need a lot of power behind the scenes. So called "bargain" hosting doesn’t provide that, at least without nickel and diming you for every upgrade.

Make sure you have the power you need and trust.

Technical Information

Physical Data Center Facility

Ability Commerce utilizes a Co-location Data Center facility to meet and exceed your high-availability/up-time requirements (99.9+%), as follows:

General
• Technical staff is onsite 24x7x365
• SAS 70 Type II Certification
• PCI Compliance
• Biometric Hand Scan for security
• Disaster Recovery Site / Site Redundancy

Telecommunications
• Redundant Internet backbone connections with three Tier 1 carriers
• Redundant building fiber entrances
• Cross-connects to other carriers also available

Building Power, Generator and UPS Systems
• Building service feeds from three Xcel Energy transformer vaults
• One (1) 2.25MW Caterpillar generator dedicated to the co-location Data Center
• Two (2) 1.0MW Cummins generators for both the co-location Data Center and building power
• Three (3) below-ground diesel tanks totaling 25,000 gallons of generator diesel fuel
• Four (4) UPS Systems totaling 775kVA of power capacity
• Five (5) days of fuel onsite for generators, if necessary

Fire Suppression
• Halon 1301 fire suppression with above- and below-floor smoke and ionic sensors for early detection

Cooling and Climate Control
• Building chiller loop provides a cooling capacity of 2,750 tons
• Thirteen (13) CRAC units provide 250 tons of cooling capacity to the co-location Data Center and are backed up by our generator in the event of power failure

Monitoring

Web Site monitoring is done with a multi-level approach. Uptime is monitored via a software alert system that will alert the entire IT staff if the web sites are either not available, or the site's content is not available. Software monitoring is done once every ten minutes, with an alert sent upon an error. For production stopping issues the customer can expect a call from a support representative 24/7 365 within 30 minutes of a reported issue, and hourly updates there after until the issue is resolved. Ability Commerce IT staff is available 24/7 365 either on site or over via an On-Call after normal business hours.

Security

Ability Commerce web sites and physical data center security are PCI compliant. Database servers are kept behind a firewall with access granted on a need to know basis. Vendor provided default passwords are removed from or changed on all equipment. Passwords and Credit Card information are stored in encrypted formats. The physical data center is accessible only to individuals who have a need to be in that area. Data Center doors remain locked at all times and are only accessible after visual verification of credentials combined with biometrics and a 6-digit key code.

Network

Ability Commerce network is standardized on best-of-breed network and server infrastructure with full redundancy for all core network hardware, including switches, routers/firewalls, load balancers. The data center is serviced by multiple redundant internet backbones with three Tier-1 carriers and with redundant building fiber entrances; with the capability to a capacity to over 100 mbps within a 24 hour period.

Disaster Recovery

Nightly backups are performed on all production web and SQL systems. Weekly backup tapes are stored off site with a bonded, secure storage facility. Backup and recover/restore procedures are tested on a regular basis. Our Data Center capabilities include physical site redundancy to meet and exceed your failover and disaster recovery requirements.

How to Compare?

You want to find not the cheapest, but rather the best hosting solution. Ability SmartSite is a sophisticated, high-powered tool; not your average web store. A web hosting package that provides basic .asp or.html website hosting cannot adequately support all the functionality built in to Ability SmartSite.

Ability SmartSite requires 2 environments. One environment is the production ecommerce (live) site where customers place orders and where you access the content management system to manage your site. These environments will communicate with a single Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Production Database that stores all of the information needed to produce the site’s content and drive orders to your Order Management System (OMS).

The second environment is a staging environment. This is used to deploy and test code upgrades prior to deploying the upgrades to the production (live) environment. Code upgrades can come in the form of a monthly version update (i.e. V7.01), tri-annual major release (i.e. V7.0 to V9.0), or minor aesthetic changes (html, .css, etc). The staging environment consists of a staging ecommerce site and a staging content management site. These environments communicate with a single Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Staging Database.

To accurately compare hosting solutions (an 'apples to apples' comparison,) you will need to ask the following questions of the hosting provider. This will help to determine if they can support all of Ability SmartSite’s functionality. Make certain your hosting provider answers "yes" to all these items before comparing prices.

1. Can you provide me with a secure SQL database?

2. Can I run custom .DLL's in your shared and/or dedicated environments?

3. Can you provide me with a secure point to point connection to my backend, such as a VPN or Frame Relay?

4. Is your data center PCI compliant?

5. Can you provide me with administrative level access to my database server?

6. Can I install 3rd party software such as Ajax or Crystal Decisions in your shared and/or dedicated environments?

7. Can I run the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework in your shared and/or dedicated environments?

8. Can you provide 24/7 support, and site monitoring?

9. Can we run the smtp service on your shared and/or dedicated environments?

10. Can we set folder level permissions in IIS (I.E certain architectural level folders should only be accessed by our application)?