LiquidWeb

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Liquidweb Interview

We caught up with the Director of Marketing & one of the technical support staff to answer 10 questions about their services:

Where are your servers located (Geographically)?

We have two (technically three) data centers. All located in Lansing, Michigan.

What is your average support ticket response time?

It depends on a number of different factors, but we generally can have a non-generated initial response around 20 minutes.

Do your support staff work at the datacenter, or remotely?

Our staff always works within a data center. Most servers are within a 2 minute walk

What is your average monthly uptime percentage (i.e. 99.9%)?

On average 99.9999%

How do you communicate downtime, outages & hardware issues with your customers?

We have a number of different methods, depending on the severity and the size of the affected customer base. Hardware issues are handled by creating a support ticket notifying the customer of the problem and the estimated time for being fixed. Outages/Downtime result in posting an event on our support page and updating our call center technicians of the specifics of the event. But again, this is based on certain variables.

How well do you handle Traffic Spikes (i.e. Digg.com)?

Our network can easily handle digged (dug?) sites. However, the real challenge is directed at the customer’s server handling the load. If they weren’t expecting the large burst of traffic (i.e. they may be running a shared account meant to accommodate moderate traffic) then they can’t always continue serving their content in the manner they typically do.

Do you have measures to accommodate this or do you make the site unavailable?

We have a complex network with multiple upstream providers. The traffic we’d handle from such events is minimal and we do our best to keep the customer’s site up. Unless the site is on a shared account and causing severe stability problems for our other customers, we’ll not bring down the website.

What measures do you have in place to help users scale their hosting needs with demand?

We have a large inventory available at any time. If you find you’re about to be featured on a large marketing website or suddenly run out of space, we have support and hardware technicians readily available to assist. RAM upgrades take mere minutes, larger harddrives and complete server upgrades take the minimum amount of time needed to transfer the data.

On a Shared Node or VPS Node how many users do you tend to allow?

Shared servers range between 100-200 users, VPS range between 10-20 instances, depending on the package level.

Some hosts offer Burst RAM & others prefer just to offer Guaranteed. Which solution do you offer & why?

We offer both with every VPS. We like to give you a guaranteed amount of resources to which you can rely on. However, it’s not uncommon for websites to generate fluctuating server loads. Burst memory is available for these situations.

In 100 words or less, why should our readers host with you?

Formed in August of 1997, Liquid Web Inc. has distinguished itself as a leader in the web hosting market with an unwavering dedication to providing the best hosting products available. Liquid Web has assembled a world class Heroic Support® technical staff, professionally educated and easily accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Liquid Web owns and operates three wholly owned data centers in the mid-western United States. Our technical staff is on-site 24×7x365 and only steps away from your server to perform whatever task you may need.