Wowrack has 10 years of experience doing this, so you don’t have to.

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It all starts with an idea. A great idea. Something you can commit to. Something you
are passionate about.

It was the same for us, 10 years ago.

With a single computer in a bedroom closet, Wowrack started 10 years ago serving a couple of
friends’ web sites. But we had a big vision, a big idea, and we committed to it.

Like any other small company we had big dreams, small resources, and lots of energy. But
launching a startup is a nervous business, and now Wowrack is in a position to help you through these tense times.

A Fondness for Startups

Ten years is both a very short – and very long! – span of time. For those of you burning the
midnight oil right now to make your new business work, we are both jealous and sympathetic of your situation. It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were working day jobs, running servers out of our apartments, answering tech calls in bed at 3:AM, tracking down nagging server problems in the middle of the night, etc.

And yet, as we look back at the last 10 years, the milestones we have hit, the advances we have
made, and the business we have created, these are the rewards we have earned from that initial hard work. It is incredible to think of what we have managed to accomplish in this decade.

Which is why we have a peculiar fondness for startups. Whether you are working a day job and
programming at night in your bedroom, or maybe one of the lucky few that get into an incubation program like TechStars, or even funding your startup on a pile of credit cards, we support your vision and we want to see you succeed.

Whatever you need to make your dream happen, let us know! Talk to us. Tell us your dream. Infect us with your energy. We empathize with your situation, and we want to be a partner in helping you make your idea grow.

Water The Seed…

Start simple. Just get that splash page up there so people can start signing up. Don’t worry if it
isn’t the final design, colors, or layout. Just get SOMETHING up there. You can refine it later.

The most valuable thing we learned in the last decade has been how to grow. From that one
server in the closet, through redundant systems, all the way to the colocation facility we have now in Tukwila, we have been through every stage you will go through. So get that splash page up there, and we’ll work together to build the right platform and hosting solution to support your business.

Every step of the way.

Not to get too “sales-y” on you, but our whole business is based on the idea that your
business can’t outpace our services. No matter how quickly (or slowly!) you grow, or how big you get, we have the capacity, experience, and skills to make sure you get the level of service your business needs.

The Proof is in the Pudding

We have worked with many businesses to help them expand their web presence as they have grown. We also remember how nerve-wracking it was to make critical business decisions
when you are sitting on the end of your bed, laptop open, the clock ticking down to another day at the office, and you just want to hit the button and get the ball rolling, finally!

Next month we will be doing a profile of a business (or two) who have walked this path with us, from concept, through launch, and then growing into a viable business.

We feel for you. We also admire you. And we will do everything we can to make sure your idea is a success.

What does “redundancy” really mean? How much redundancy does a web host really need

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Anyone who has spent time with little kids dreads the inevitable “But why?” question. When
children are about 3 or so, they go through a phase where the answer to any question is “Why?”

“You have to go to bed now.”

“Why?”

“Because you need your sleep.”

“Why?”

“Because you haveto sleep to be healthy and to grow big.”

“But why?”

“Because the cells in your body need to … hang on, why am I debating this with a 3-year old? I’m your mother and I say go to bed!”

A similar process happens when one decides to protect their web site and keep it up and running as close to 24 x 7 x 356 as possible. You address one potential point of failure and then ask, “But what if…” And then you address the next potential failure, and the next, and the next, and on and on and on.

The Basics

For most web sites that are just starting out, they are housed on a single computer. (Probably
with a bunch of other web sites, as well.)

Those computers have several potential points of failure: hard disks, power supplies, network connections, viruses, poorly maintained software, etc. So there needs to be a stock of parts to replace hardware that fails, and there need to be technicians on hand to install the hardware and fix software problems.

But if the hard drive or power supply fails, the entire computer (and all the web sites on it) disappears from the internet until the new hardware can be installed and configured.

So you build in redundant systems.

For example, you can have a second hard disk in the machine that is “mirroring” the primary hard disk. Everything that happens on the primary hard disk is immediately copied on the mirror disk. So in the event of a hard disk failure, the computer automatically switches to the backup drive and a technician is notified of the hardware failure.

Total downtime for the web site? Less than a second.

If you were a particularly precocious 3-year old you might then ask, “But what if the power
supply fails so BOTH hard drives lose power?”

“In that case,” you answer patiently, “we have a second computer that is mirroring the first one. If something major fails in the first computer, then traffic is automatically routed to the second one, and the first one is taken offline. A tech is notified of the failure, and they fix the broken computer.”

Externalities

“OK,” says the 3-year old, “what happens if a car crashes into a telephone pole, knocks the
lines down, and your whole building loses power?”

You can see where the kid is going with this, and you know you aren’t going to get out of it (bed
time is a long way off) but you are prepared. After all, Seattle has severe windstorms, semi-regular flooding, and even earthquakes that all can affect the City’s ability to deliver power.

That’s why there is a wall of backup batteries at Wowrack. Literally. An entire wall.

But batteries only buy you a little bit of time, in which you can bridge brief power outages,
brownouts, or other power problems. You get a few minutes to assess the scope of the problem and decide whether to shut everything down or…

… go outside and fire up Wowrack’s HUGE diesel generator!

A small car accident or tree branch falling on a power line is no reason for your web site to drop off the internet. That’s why Wowrack has a diesel generator outside that can run the facility – all the servers, all the cooling systems, all the battery backups – for as long as there is fuel available for the generator.

So Wowrack has power covered. But staying on the internet is more than just keeping the lights on and the servers running. There still has to be a cable connecting you to the
internet.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Fortunately the Seattle metropolitan area has a lot of big fat data pipes coming from all over
the world. There are two in particular that Wowrack uses, one due north of us a little more than 10 miles away, and another due south of us about 8 miles away in a different city entirely. That means we are protected from construction crews digging in the ground, citywide power outages or natural disasters, and other similar problems. If one of our data pipes goes down due to almost any conceivable disaster, it’s a pretty sure thing that the other will be up and
running and unaffected.

And that means your web site will remain running, despite almost any environmental chaos
surrounding our building.

“But, but but,” the 3-year old splutters…

“Oh boy,” you think, “here we go…”

“But what if an airplane crashes into your building?!?” the little one cries.

“Bed time!”

Redundancy and Risk Assessment

Every business owner makes their own decisions about the level of security, redundancy, and
disaster preparedness that is reasonable for their business, their city, their country, and the list of possible things that can go wrong.

Here at Wowrack we have more than 10 years of experience keeping our customers web sites up and available on the internet. While nobody can easily achieve 100% uptime, the few
outages we experienced led us immediately to improved systems inside our company.

No matter where your customers are in the world, or when they access your web site, we have
taken every reasonable measure we can to ensure that your site is alive and well on the internet 24×7. No matter what is happening in Seattle that day!

An excellent web hosting service is one that is invisible to the customer. But when problems arise, Wowrack works fast to become “invisibly good” again.

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Building a presence for yourself online can seem to be one problem after another. All you want is to have your web site out there for people to find. And then you discover the domain name you want is taken! And you can’t decide whether to use WordPress to build your site, buy a template, code your own site, or pay someone else to do it. And then every feature you thought should be standard in a web site turns out to be an “extra” that you didn’t budget for at the beginning! These problems can seemingly go on, and on, and on, and on.

So once you finally get your site up and running, you want to focus on your business, not on the mechanics of running your business’s web site.

In essence, you want your web hosting service to be invisible, so you can get on with your work.

At Wowrack, we do everything we can to be invisibly good.

In other articles we will talk about the infrastructure we have built in our hosting facility, so the geeks and nerds out there can obsess over the details. But this article is about you and the experience we want you to have.

Managed? Dedicated? Colo? Oh my!

Everyone has to start somewhere, and that’s why we provide Managed Hosting. This is the right place to start your online business. We take care of the servers and the network, and you take care of the front end of the store.

You don’t need to mess with any hardware or server configuration – we do all that for you! We take care of the part we are good at, and you do the parts you are good at. Like hiring a bookkeeper or a tax preparer to take care of your business finances, you need a professional to run your server and make all that stuff invisible to you.

That Initial Hump

Once you have purchased a service from us, the biggest hurdle to launching your web site is the initial configuration and testing period. Getting all the files in the right places, making sure the graphics are in the right directory so they appear properly on your site, getting email set up, and configuring the online shopping cart that can charge credit cards and let you know when someone has placed an order.

For new customers, Wowrack wants you to get through this initial setup phase as quickly and painlessly as possible. That’s why we answer the phone 24×7. There is always a real person on the other end of the phone ready to help you with your configuration and setup issues.

Growing With Your Business

Now that your web site is set up and running, here come the customers! But what if things go really well? What if your site gets hammered by all the traffic? Maybe your product or service suddenly went viral! How are you going to deal with all that extra traffic?

Well, the best part is that our Managed Hosting service upgrades easily. So if your business grows, we can very easily get you upgraded onto a newer server, or even onto a dedicated server farm. This will happen when you ask us to, and without you needing to be an expert in servers, hosting, or other back-end technologies.

If the demand goes up then we can easily upgrade your site. Once again, invisibly!

Capacity for all your needs

Another part of being “invisibly good” is being able to grow with your business, no matter how large your business becomes. The people at Wowrack consider our customers as family, and no matter how big or demanding your families’ needs become, we have the capacity, the skill, and the technology to make sure your hosting is always invisibly good.

Keep Reading!

Keep an eye on this section of our web site for more information about our infrastructure, our redundant systems, and case studies of how Wowrack has served many customers over the last 10 years.

The basics of web hosting, for the web site novice.

Every time you sit down at the computer, open a web browser (like Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer), and click on a link or type in an address that begins with “www.”, there is a complex set of actions happening in the background to take you to a web page.

The exact path these bits and bytes take is an amazing story, and it will be covered in another article in more detail. Today we want to focus on the most basic question of all, “What is Web Hosting?” to help you understand the magic that brings the internet to your screen.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Every web site exists as a series of files stored on a computer somewhere out there in the world. When you type in the address for a site like Amazon.com, your computer sends signals out to the internet, finds the Amazon web server(s), and tells your computer how to talk to those servers.

For you, the aspiring businessperson, you simply want to get your information out there on the internet so your customers can start finding you. So when they type “www.YourAmazingBusinessName.com” into their web browser, your smiling face shows up.

But what does this take? How does it work?

From the Phone Book to the Front Door

Building a web site on the internet is like building in undeveloped land around a city. You can build whatever you want, make it as big (or as small) as you want, and use any paint and architectural combination you desire.

This can all be done on your computer, with files stored on your computer. Or you can pay someone else to build those files on their computer. But once those files are complete, that is when a web server is needed.

A web server is simply a computer with some special software installed on it. When you place your files into a particular directory or folder on that computer, the web server can see those files.

For your first web site, you are probably going to use someone else’s web server. If you have ever created a Tumblr, Blogger, or WordPress site, you have simply been creating a web site on someone else’s server. These tools help you automate the process of design, layout, serving, and publishing.

But in the end, there is still just a computer out there on the internet, running web-hosting software, with your files in a specific folder on its hard disk. Whether that computer is housed here at Wowrack, or at Google, or anywhere else, they all work on the same basic principles.

So when someone types “www.YourAmazingBusinessName.com” into their web browser, the server with your files on it responds to the request, and provides the web page. That gets people to your front door.

Cottage or Mansion?

Once inside your web site, people then see what you have created. And this is where the attributes of the server come into consideration.

To support a site with many graphics, animations, videos, or other large files, your server should be very fast and have a fast connection to the internet. People don’t like to wait for things to load – they expect things to appear instantly – so server speed, and the speed of the server’s network, are both important to consider.

If you want to accept payments online and let your customers pay for your items with a credit card, for example, then security is of the utmost concern. A secure server is required to protect your customers’ data.

The other thing to consider here is that if you have a large selection of items available on your site, then you probably need a database to store all those items, and a way to access and update that data. This also requires a very secure system, but databases take a different toll on the server itself. So not every server can run large databases as well as others.

These are just some of the “cottage vs mansion” decisions you will need to make when building your web site. In almost every case, it is the wisest decision to start with the minimum number of features you need, and then grow organically according to customer demand.

Building The Addition

There is a concept called “Minimum Viable Product” that is a wise thing to keep in mind when developing your first web product. Each of the features mentioned above will cost a little more than a basic web-hosting package. So when designing your web site, come up with the ultimate idea… and then start trimming off features.

Continue trimming features until you can’t possibly remove another feature, or the product will not work. Then, release that “MVP” and listen to your initial customers feedback.
As they define the features that you should work on, it will help dictate what kind of hosting you need to grow into. As you build these features – these additions to your cottage or mansion on the internet – your web hosting needs will expand. But there is no need to start off with a huge hosting package “just in case”.
We at Wowrack are here to help you make the right decisions for your web product, and to be able to grow with you as your customers and your business dictates.

That’s what we have been doing for ten years now for literally thousands of web sites. Let us help you be the biggest success you can be.