Hardware and Data Centers

Thirdfloor maintains dedicated development and public server hardware in Australia and the United States. Two continents, two hemispheres, two timezones.

North American Data Center

Location

• Herndon, VA.
• HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) systems are N+1 redundant, with full particle filtering and humidity control.
• On-site, auto-switched power generator, and centralized UPS systems provide power conditioning and ensure uninterrupted data center operation.

Security

• Physically isolated from everyone but level three technicians.
• Public access is strictly forbidden.
• Access to the floor the datacenter resides on is restricted and completely locked down.
• Fully switched network. Traffic destined for a website hosted on a server is sent only through switching equipment necessary to deliver the information to that server. This minimizes the risk of someone sniffing or capturing traffic being sent across the network.
• Vigorous prosecution of persons who generate malicious attacks on our internal network.

Cisco Powered Network

• Tier 1 bandwidth providers, including Peer 1 Network, SBC, Allegiance, and Time Warner, built on a Cisco powered network, with guaranteed 99.9% uptime.
• Using enterprise-class networking gear, all routers, layer-2 switches, and layer-3 switches are tested in labs prior to deployment to ensure stability and interoperability.
• Fastest possible data transfers.

Dynamic Routing

• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4) for best case routing. The BGP4 protocol is a standard that allows for the routing of packets of information sent out from our network.
• Should one of our providers fail, packets leaving our network are automatically redirected through another route via a different provider.

Australian Data Centre

Our Melbourne installations are all to the highest standards - with similar specifications to the Virginia Data Center above.

• Server is in secure data centre in the Australian Stock Exchange building in Collins Street Melbourne.
• Unrestricted bandwidth to the internet via our multiple 100MBit/s links.
• Cisco powered network.
• Secure facilities featuring 24/7 security patrols and swipe card access.
• Public access forbidden.
• Industrial grade fire suppression and air conditioning.

General

• Backup servers are deployed in Sydney Australia, on separate networks, ready to take over if any main server fails.
• Automatic offsite backups are made on a daily basis.
• No direct customer access to any server that is running Gazette.
• Each customer Gazette instance runs in a secure environment on the server.
• Gazette is deployed in a way that is not susceptible to common attacks (cross site scripting) made on servers running PHP, ASP or straight CGI style software.
• Daily backups of all data are available as a download link from within Gazette, no extra software is needed, the backup is as a CD-ROM image that can be directly written to disk.
• Gazette can deployed onto a totally private machine if needs justify the extra cost.