How can I tell if my provider is really running their own network and hosting me in Australia?

I like to be on top of every issue we have at work, some call me a micromanager and some call me a pain in the backside, however I love my job, and I love my customers! I like to ensure that everyone is getting what they are paying for, and that is a quality service here at Servers Australia! So every day, I spend time with the Sales, Marketing and Support teams to ensure that everything is running as it should! However last week I heard two VERY interesting conversations, one was from tech support and the other was in the sales department.

I heard one of our tech support staff explaining to a customer, that the reason they had issues with their site load time on their old host was because they were being hosted offshore, in the USA to be exact… however they were under the impression that they were hosted here in Australia because they were buying from an Australia hosting company, who claimed to be hosted here in Australia.

This is very common issue, as customers generally don’t know if their host is being true and really is hosting them in Australia or offshore. You might ask, “Why does it matter?” Well there are many reasons, such as site load times, data security and privacy, connectivity congestion to the offshore site and the risk of undersea cable cuts.

The other conversation in the sales side was very similar but a bit different. The provider they were buying off claimed to own their own data centre and network and were a huge global corporation, it was only when our sales manager (Craig) pointed out to them that the host they were buying off was a one man band, and actually hosted their servers on someone else’s network as well as in someone else data centre!!! I was shocked, how can people go around saying that they own these data centre and networks, when they are simply reselling someone else’s services, surely this has to be illegal!

Anyway, the point of me mentioning this is to show customers as well as readers how they can see if they’re being scammed. As we like to be as transparent as possible with our customers, we own and operate our own network, we also own our own data centre, we also lease space in 3 other data centres that are not ours, and we have a physical office with staff in it that any customers or potential customers are more than welcome to swing by and say hello!

So how can you tell if you are hosted overseas?

There are a few things you can do. First of all do a simple PING test to see how long it takes to get a ‘ping’ response from your server; this can be done on any Mac or windows PC. On windows 7 go to start → run → (type cmd and hit enter) → type ‘ping yourwebsite.com.au’

This will then show you something like the above. If you get a result of over say 100 ms, then your site is definitely NOT hosted in Australia. If you get a ‘request timed out’ then this means that you have a firewall that blocks pings (ICMP) from coming into the server, try the below.

Another way to check is to now get the IP that was returned in the above (202.130.35.126 in my case) and then going to the Geo IP data base to look up the location of the IP using this website: http://www.whatismyip.com/tools/ip-address-lookup.asp

This should tell you the country and even the state that your site is hosted in. Pretty cool huh?

If you want to know who actually owns your network, there are a number of tools you can use, the one I use all the time for network lookups is http://bgp.he.net. This tool will show you some very cool and detailed information (if you know how to read it) and will also list who actually owns your IP address range and the servers you are on.

If you go the above URL and enter the IP address that you have been given in the previous part, e.g. 202.130.35.126, and press search, it will show you that ‘description’ of the IP address, and also an AS number, this is the public
network identifier that tells the world where your IP lives. If you click on the AS number, this will then show you who your dedicated server or web hosting provider really is. For example, I have just looked up 202.130.35.126 which is our website, this tells me that we own the IP (http://bgp.he.net/AS45671) and that we connect to 7 different networks, this page will not show all the peers, they can be seen by clicking on the ‘Peers v4’ tab at the top of the page, the more peers the AS number has means the more networks that they are directly connected to.

If you do this search and it doesn’t show your dedicated server provider, then the chances are they do NOT own their own network; therefore they are only reselling someone else’s network. This is all well and good, until an issue arises and you have to wait for your host, who waits for their host, who waits for the supplier (like a chain of command) and this can cause lengthy delays if you need something resolved urgently.

The final issue I want to cover is “does your provider have a physical address?” Do they allow visits to their data centre and staff? We at Servers Australia are always open to visits and also Data Centre tours of the Data Centres that we are allowed to show, so next time you are speaking with you host, challenge them and ask to meet for a coffee at THEIR office and see what they say, you can also ask for a Data Centre tour and see if they really do own their own Data Centre!

If you can benefit from free web hosting, a free server, savings on data storage or would like to get your hands on a free iPad 2, Servers Australia could be your best friend this Christmas!

Servers Australia are rewarding our Facebook friends by giving away free web hosting to friends with an ABN. Our free web hosting includes 500MB Disk Space, 5 GB Data Transfer, cPanel Control Panel and more. Visit Servers Australia Facebook page to sign up for your free web hosting today.

It’s no secret that successful businesses and enterprises perform best with fast, secure and reliable servers. Add to your current server network or get your very first server for free and enter the draw to win a dedicated server here.

If you’re looking to expand your business and need more data space, we’re cutting your costs. Servers Australia are dismissing the setup fee for all new Equinix SYD3 Colocation customers until 20/12/12. You’ve one more week to jump on this special offer, saving you up to $199. See our website for more information.

We are giving away iPad 2 tablets! Servers Australia are giving away, one-for-one iPad 2′s with every E3-1245 starter series server or higher on a 24 month contract. That means if you buy 10 servers you get 10 iPad 2′s! See our servers series here.

Unlike Santa, we’re giving away these deals whether you’ve been naughty or nice -but we hope it’s the latter!

We are offering double bandwidth and double ram to new customer purchases of the ‘Starter Series’ of our Dedicated Servers range. With speed and reliability, our ‘Starter Series’ servers are top choice for entry-level mail server, application server, database or web servers. See Servers Australia website for complete details on our ‘Starter Series’.

Also, as part of our Equinix SYD3 Launch Promotion, we are giving away 50GB free data per 1RU, saving up to $55.00 per RU. Backed by state-of-the-art security, network connectivity and redundant power, Equinix is the ideal location for your colocated equipment. See Servers Australia website for details on our ‘Equinix Colocation’. (Available to new colocation customers only.)

These special offers expire on the 10^th November, so be quick to take advantage of these deals. Call us on 1300 788 862 or email sales@serversaustralia.com.au.

We haven’t shared some photos of our data center in a while. Here are some pics of one of the SAU Data Center Colocation Room Racks.

This is just a quick update to let people know that stage one of the Servers Australia data centre, we now have power, cooling and connectivity and are already filling up the racks fast with servers!

Photos will come soon..

We are so so close to the full openening of stage one! We are looking at an open day of today or tomorrow, I have posted photos below of the near completed stage.

Wow, a month has gone already since I last blogged! Well alot has happened in that time, and when I say alot I mean alot!
I will try not bore people with the boring ‘paper work’ and formality stuff and get down to the nitty gritty of what has been happening!

Well after my last post you would have seen that we started construction on the office downstairs which included a reception / display area, large board room, small meeting room, kitchen / lunchroom, server build and test room and a common area for the co-location facility!

Well after I posted that there had been a heap of work done and the Gyprock has all been completed along with all the internal electrical, security and security cameras, there was ALOT of cable that went into the office and I am amazed at how much we used…

OK, so now you are wondering about the Data Centre, well this has progressed heaps since my last post and we now have some of the power upgrades that we were waiting on and the fiber has finally been laid, it has not been tested as yet and this is one final thing that we are waiting on before we can open stage one of the Data Centre.

Once stage one is open we will instantly be starting on stage two, and I will be posting a day by day blog of that once it has started and been completed.

For now I have posted the following images below;

- More office pictures
- Fiber Installation work
- Power installation work
- Delivery of the Libert-Emerson 45kw CRAC’s (Computer Room Air Conditioners)
- Delivery of the power cabinets
- UPS images

I will post more info as I go, as there is currently ALOT of work happening and stage one is near completion, this means that we will have customers moving in to the facility within the next 2-3 weeks!

After what feels like a few weeks, we have finally started construction on the lower level of the office, this will give us a nice reception / display area, large board room, small meeting room, kitchen / lunchroom, server build and test room and a common area for the co-location facility!

Since the construction only started on Monday, you can only see the skeleton of the walls, the Gyprock will be complete by Thursday or Friday and then it looks like we will be painting on the weekend…

Once this is complete, we will move onto the finalization of the co-location facility, there has just been a huge amount of back end things that have had to be resolved before we can actually finish the flooring and cabling, the main contributor is the fibre links and the installation of more power to the building to handle the load.

firstly oops! I have been soo busy with everything that has been going on I forgot to Blog! So here I am with some pretty cool updates!

The main reason behind me being so busy is that we are building a state of the art co-location facility in Tuggerah and that has taken much of my time, BUT what a lot of people did not know was that we also moved the Servers Australia, One Provider and Replica offices and finally combined the three companies into one BIG office, and yes it is nice and BIG with even more room to come in the next few weeks once construction is finished!

The move happened over the past week, and we will hopefully be settled by the end of the week and fully functional again…although we will not be doing an official opening for around another 4-6 weeks, as this is the time that the SAUDC-1 will be completed, once this is done we will be having some huge specials and a celebration of the new office and data centre, so if you want to join in simply send me an e-mail. We would love to see you there! And of course it is no party without food and beverages, so there will be lots of that supplied by us.

I have attached some images of the office below, the bright colours are matching to our logo (I know they are bright, but they look soo soo cool!)

Samantha and Myself have our own office at the front of the office which will over look the sales / support staff that will be in the open plan part of the office, then down the back of the office we will have the two Sales managers Geoff and Anthony, who will be able to look over the new Data Centre, as well as the sales / support staff and the new board room that will be either downstairs or upstairs, we have not decided yet, but I will make a decision with the others some time this week.

Downstairs, we will have a reception / display room, a small meeting room, lunch room and kitchen and a Network Operations Centre, that will over look and connect to the Co-location room to help customers who break their servers and for general maintenance on equipment!

Well that is all I have for now on the office, I will also post an update on the DC build very shortly.

Ok, so in my last post I stated that we (Servers Australia Pty Ltd) are building a Data Centre shortly.

This is a very big step for us as a wholesale provider and will allow us to offer affordable, reliable and cheap co-location space to our new and existing customers.

We will be building the facility to high standards and will be using proper Data Centre equipment such as:

- N+1 CRAC cooling systems
- N+1 Power system
- 300mm raised flooring, capable of holding 1800kg / square metre

The first stage of the facility will house approx 150 racks with stage 2 housing a further 150-200 racks, we are anticipating to have stage 1 open by June 30th and I will start posting photos and updates on here daily when the construction actually starts!

So far we have ordered all the needed parts / components for the Data Centre and most of it has arrived, the images below show the racks being loaded from the manufacturer onto a truck to be sent to us and the raised flooring in a container that was shipped to us (there is over 300m2 of flooring in stage 1)

The next images will be of the start of construction, and the connection of the redundant Gigabit Fibre links!