Our resilient infrastructure allows us to meet the growing needs of our customers. In this article, we will look under the hood at our Samrand data centre, our customer control panel and the security and mitigation measures we have in place to ensure we remain trusted in hosting.
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Our state-of-the-art data centre
Our data centre in Samrand, Gauteng, currently houses around 8000 physical servers and 300 colocation racks.
Below are some recent achievements from the powerhouse behind our business.
Energy-efficiency
Our data centre has an excellent annual PUE rating of 1.2 – a global measure of a data centre’s energy efficiency. We maintain this rating by consciously innovating how we use energy, including:
- Positioning our racks to reduce power usage
- Using a high-density design to manage our floor space
- Employing free cooling to auto-adjust the temperature based on outside conditions.
With our energy-saving measures, we are able to keep our power usage low.
Disruption measures
Xneelo offers 99.9% network uptime. During load shedding, we employ a fully redundant UPS feed to all IT equipment as well as four 2.5 MVA backup generators to limit disruption to our customers and ensure network stability.
Increased uplink speed
We are always looking for opportunities to boost performance for our customers. Recently, we increased the uplink speed for servers at all locations from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, at no additional cost to our customers.
Increased IP Transit capacity
We increased our IP Transit capacity to 10 Gbps, with an additional 6 Gbps for backups, which can be leveraged by both our data centres. This new capacity gives us greater flexibility for how and where we route our traffic and further improves our redundancy and resilience. It also allows us to relook the future cost of bandwidth and traffic quotas.
CDN
While not strictly a data centre highlight, one of the results of our iterative improvement process is our new enterprise CDN product. The ability to deliver website content faster through caching technology is one more way we can offer additional value and performance benefits to our customers.
Network upgrades
We’ve invested significantly into our network infrastructure to keep our network on par with global standards. Recently, we upgraded our network core, switches and retired ageing technology in favour of modern and more resilient Juniper equipment.
Network upgrades provide customers with higher network availability and allow us to perform maintenance at any time with less downtime.
Robust security
Security remains a continuous focus. Every improvement we make involves stringent safety and security controls to ensure the ongoing protection of our customers.
Physical security
Our PCI-DSS-compliant data centre has 55 surveillance cameras, which are strategically placed and monitored around the clock. Access is controlled by advanced biometric scanning systems, with 20 devices and pin-coded keypads. High-voltage security fences and a 24/7 security presence prevent any unauthorised access.
Fire prevention
Our data centre is a low fire risk, thanks to the Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus (VESDA) installed to trigger alarms at the slightest hint of smoke particles.
Server management
Managed servers are monitored 24/7 for all critical services and hardware health. Our reactive system administrators escalate issues to data centre staff or platform engineers as they’re identified. Managed servers are automatically backed up daily for disaster recovery purposes.
Abuse mitigation
From spam management and phishing education to bolstering our security features to ensure better protection, we are always alert to new and existing threats, so our customers can continue to have peace of mind. Here are a few of the ways we help protect your business should the worst happen.
Spam management
Spam mitigation is a difficult science to get right – we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our spam mitigation on behalf of our customers. We take a number of measures to keep out most threats. Our spam filtering, which makes use of resources developed both in-house and externally, detects most harmful messages while attempting to limit disruption to normal email communications. We also adopt security standards such as SPF and DKIM on our incoming email servers to identify and prevent forged emails from getting through.
Over a 30-day period, we reject around 10 million potentially fraudulent emails which fail SPF checks.
Network security
Network-level security consists of three main elements: DDoS mitigation, VLAN reverse path forwarding protection and Juniper firewall rules at the network edge and core.
Our Control Panel
The xneelo Control Panel has extensive security and permission features in place to ensure a safe and secure experience. This includes two-factor authentication, access control, and the Collaborators feature that allows you to assign individual roles with their own login details.
We have also recently introduced two-factor authentication for customers who are using konsoleH.
PHP
As your web hosting provider, we update PHP annually to ensure your website continues to perform at its best, and to reduce the threat of security vulnerabilities.
Platform management
Our customers require their hosting and server management to be robust, reliable and dependable. For this reason, our hardware platform is monitored round the clock and managed by our engineers.
Website threat mitigation
Website traffic is monitored and protected by a Web Application Firewall (WAF). We manage and maintain the rule set that drives the WAF, so that we’re able to block a large portion of malicious traffic to websites while maintaining a low false positive detection rate.
In August 2023, our firewall stopped more than 4 million potentially malicious requests.
Cloudbric WAF
Over and above the robust security features mentioned, Web Hosting customers have the option to add an extra layer of website-level protection in the form of Cloudbric WAF, which acts as a firewall to block malicious and suspicious traffic and keeps a permanent block list of exploitative and hacking attempts.
Try it for one month free.
At xneelo, we continue to invest in the latest technologies and best practices to ensure our continued reliability, security, scalability, and efficiency – to deliver the hosting services that set us apart.
