Squarespace

[javamoma]

I've noticed a lot of ads on the site for squarespace. I just starting using them a few months ago for my website and have loved them. Just wondering if the dis uses squarespace for their site?

 

[k5jm]

This will go into the weeds, but here is what the DIS uses for their online environment.

The Hardware we run on

A question I get frequently is what kind of hardware do our sites run on? All of our hardware is hosted with a service in Virginia. The Data center is a completely secure facility with 24 hour monitoring and incredibly power and fire suppresion systems. It houses over 60,000 square feet of computers.

They have huge generators on site along with abundant fuel and they have multiple high speed connections to the internet.

Verio maintains it’s own networks world wide

Those blue lines represent OC192 lines. Just to give you an idea of how big that is, a OC192 goes for 250,000 to 500,000 a month!

Your first stop when visiting any of our sites is the load balancer. It’s a Nortel Alteon unit that looks like this:

Each of our sites runs on multiple servers and this unit decides which server to send you too. The next stop is our firewall. for security reasons we’ll just say it’s a very good one.

The actual servers are all on the same chassis, the Hewlett Packard Proliant DL380 G5. We have 8 of these. 3 are running Red Hat Linux and the other 5 are Microsoft Windows Server 2003. All of them have 2 Intel 5160 Dual core 3.0 processors. The amount of memory and the hard drive configuration varies depending on the use of the server. An HP DL 380 looks like this:

The boards database server is also hooked up to a shared fiber channel SAN. The servers are each dedicated to certain tasks. We have 2 web servers for the boards, 3 web servers for Dreams, Wdwinfo and some other sites, 1 MySql server for the boards and another Mysql server for the other sites. The 8th server is dedicated to email. The boards alone send out over a million emails a week. The servers have their own back end communication system and that is how they are backed up and how the web servers talk to the database servers.

WebmasterAlex