Easy-TimeShare Provides High Up-Time!

Our system is maintained for a large number of users, rather than a few. Therefore, we cannot afford to, nor do we have to, cut corners on system hardware or administrative support. This means higher levels of up time, and far less "catastrophic" downtime than people who maintain their own systems experience. Before explaining our service guarantees, let's look at how our redundancy creates minimum downtime.

The first is obvious: two sites to serve you: one on the east coast, and one on the west coast, of the United States. The odds of having both areas simultaneously go out of business due to natural disaster or random event are extremely low! Thus, we always have a way to rapidly rebuild your system and get you back on line within hours even if the worst contingency happens.

The next step is redundancy within the hardware itself. All of our servers contain disk mirrors, to protect against drive failure. And we maintain large quantities of spares of all components at each site. Thus, when a system crashes, replacement and bringing the system back on line is a matter of minutes, rather than days or hours, as is common for most businesses which maintain their own computers.

Next follows excess capacity. Capacity comes in two forms. The obvious is that each computer is designed with excess storage and processing capacity, both so that you can grow without our doing a lot of work, and so that we can move users onto other computers in the event of multiple catastrophes. The actual machine you connect to is irrelevant to you, as the Easy-TimeShare routing software automatically takes care of determining which machine you are connected to.

The second capacity issue is bandwidth. We don't put all of our eggs in one basket. We use multiple data channels so that if a particular line fails or becomes marginal, you can be routed to a new channel within seconds, and each channel is therefore purposefully under-loaded to assure that other lines can take up the slack.

And the last design issue, from our side, is regular data backup. While your data is always being mirrored on two hard drives, we also back it up nightly, using virtual save technology, to alternating machines in the same complex, thus assuring you that your backups are on other systems in the event of failure. In the event of catastrophic failure, we will also back your data up to systems at our other complex, based upon the frequency you select.

The practical consequent of all of this is extremely low down-time, even in highly adverse situations. Accordingly, we are able to offer service quarantee options to our customers which incur penalties if we are down as little as one contiguous hour in a month. (Please consult our pricelists and service agreement for service guarantee options.)

You may believe that connecting to a remote site is likely to have higher levels of failure, because of the greater system complexity. In the exact sense, you are right, because there is a higher "potential" for failure. But this misses two core points. The first is that we build redundancy into our systems, to overcome failure before it happens. We also design our system so that repair of any broken component is a matter of minutes rather than hours or days.

As long as you use a good Internet provider at your local service end, and find yourself a competent hardware maintenance company to repair failures of hardware at your site, you will find that our services provide you with superior up-time. More importantly, our remote service helps you to avoid the catastrophic downtime often associated with locally maintained systems. Due to corners cut, or other problems, we have often seen end-users who's locally maintained computers were down for weeks at a time, placing the business at risk.