Behind the scenes of website hosting

Posted on 1 Nov 2010 at 10:37

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These days, anyone can quickly and easily create a website, but few give any thought to what it takes to make that website available to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Expert Reviews was given exclusive behind-the-scenes access to 1&1’s data centres in Karlsruhe, Germany to find out just how serious the business of web hosting really is.

1&1 is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world, and has over 70,000 servers in multiple data centres across the globe. Two of these data centres are in Karlsruhe, one in the centre of town holding 4,000 servers and the other at Baden-Airpark, with a whopping 25,000 servers.

Simply having huge numbers of servers to host millions of websites isn’t enough, though. 1&1 has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that its customers’ 11 million sites remain online no matter what.

The company’s Baden-Airpark facility is typical of other sites around the world. The data centre is housed in an old military bunker that was built in 1951 for the French Air Force. It was later used by the Royal Canadian Air Force, but closed in 1993. 1&1 re-opened the bunker as a data centre in 2006, after converting it to house servers instead of jet fighters.

We were fortunate enough to be among the first group of journalists allowed to see the inside of the facility, which wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond movie. Its window-less walls are painted camouflage green, while circuits of barbed wire surround the flat roof 40 feet above us. Most impressively, the original military-spec entrance remains. After unlocking a steel box to reveal a keypad, our guide tapped in his code, and the 1m-thick steel door slid away to reveal another pair of impenetrable steel doors.

Behind these is yet another 10in thick steel door: an 'airlock' system to ensure there’s never an open route to the outside world. The doors can be kept open only a short time before the alarm system is triggered. Through this third door is a brightly lit corridor with more doors, each accessible only with a key card.

Some of these rooms contain the all-important web servers. Some are dedicated servers, which are rented by a customer for their own website, while others are ‘shared’ servers which can serve hundreds of websites. Each vertical rack can hold up to 80 servers, and there are 24 racks in each row, meaning that each room to houses thousands of servers.