Our Internet Connection

We have direct T-3 connections to UUNET's backbone. (see The UUNET U.S. Backbone map above) (If you want to know more about UUNET, visit their site at: www.uu.net )

Those in the industry recognize T-3 (approx. 28 times faster than a T-1 connection) and UUNET as meaning you're serious about incredibily fast performance.

The word "direct" is also very important. Some providers connect to other providers, who in turn connect to other providers to finally connect to the backbone. We connect directly. It's like asking "how many traffic signals and side streets to you have to go through to get on the freeway?" Many providers have a few, but we're sitting right on the "on ramp" to the freeway.

Our server computers

We use Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) computers that are specially configured for giving you blazingly fast speed. They are among the fastest server computers in the world. (If you want to know more about SGI and their super computers, visit their site at: www.sgi.com )

With our recent upgrade to SGI we started realizing about 4 times the speed in accessing pages.

Our Operating System

SGI Fifth Generation 64-Bit UNIX Operating System

Since its inception in 1982, SGI has leveraged the capabilities and benefits of industry-standard UNIX® through the IRIX operating system technology. IRIX has been instrumental in enabling SGI to deliver generations of leading edge high performance computing, advanced graphics and visual computing platforms. IRIX is compliant with UNIX System V Release 4 and The Open Group's many standards including UNIX 95, Year 2000, and POSIX. All SGI computing and visualization platforms have been characterized by extreme computing, data management and visualization capabilities. IRIX has played a strategic role in delivering these extreme capabilities towards solving some of the hardest problems in the computing markets. (If you want to know more about this, visit: www.sgi.com/software/irix6.5/ )

Our server software

We use the Apache httpd server software, it ...

• is a powerful, flexible, HTTP/1.1 compliant web server
• implements the latest protocols, including HTTP/1.1 (RFC2068)
• is highly configurable and extensible with third-party modules
• can be customised by writing 'modules' using the Apache module API
• provides full source code and comes with an unrestrictive license
• runs on most versions of Unix without modification
• is actively being developed
• encourages user feedback through new ideas, bug reports and patches
• implements many frequently requested features:
  
  

  DBM databases for authentication

  allows you to easily set up password-protected pages with enormous numbers of authorized users, without bogging down the server.

  Customized responses to errors and problems

  Allows you to set up files, or even CGI scripts, which are returned by the server in response to errors and problems, e.g. setup a script to intercept 500 Server Errors and perform on-the-fly diagnostics for both users and yourself.

  Multiple DirectoryIndex directives

  Allows you to say DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi, which instructs the server to either send back index.html or run index.cgi when a directory URL is requested, whichever it finds in the directory.

  Unlimited numbers of Alias and Redirect directives

  Apache has no fixed limit on the numbers of Aliases and Redirects which may be declared in the config files.

  Content negotiation

  i.e. the ability to automatically serve clients of varying sophistication and HTML level compliance, with documents which offer the best representation of information that the client is capable of accepting.

  Multi-homed servers

  A much requested feature, sometimes known as the "APB" patches. This allows the server to distinguish between requests made to different IP addresses (mapped to the same machine).

  (If you would like more information please visit: www.apache.org/docs/ )