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More about Engine Hosting
EngineHosting has ceased accepting new clients for web hosting as of May 27, 2014.EngineHosting wasn't sold or merged with any other company.
EngineHosting specializes in providing load-balanced and highly-available clustered web hosting solutions. Our solutions can be optimized to serve ExpressionEngine clients, but they also work for dynamic web apps that are based on PHP or MySQL. Only fully managed web hosting solutions are offered. This includes extensive off-site backups and monitoring of all network operations via both in-house and external global monitoring locations. As a provider of web-hosting solutions, our primary focus is security, performance, and stability. These three objectives are the foundation of every decision we make.
Today, we operate from four data centers that are state of the art in North America. They are located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Edina and Minnesota, Fremont, California and Reston, Virginia.
Background
Gippy's Internet Solutions was founded by Nevin Lyne in 1998. It specializes in high-performance web servers for a variety of niche markets.
Nevin Lyne met Rick Ellis in 2002. They formed a partnership that opened pMachineHosting.com on October 1, 2003. This was to offer secure, stable hosting for Rick Ellis' first blogging/CMS tool, pMachine Pro.
We moved our primary datacenter location from Fremont, California to Minneapolis in 2005. The Fremont location remained in place. This was the beginning of our journey away from unload-balanced hosting to fully load-balanced hosting.
pMachineHosting.com was renamed EngineHosting.com in 2007 to communicate its focus on highly load-balanced and clustered web hosting for ExpressionEngine and other apache/mysql/php based applications. This continued our tradition of providing web hosting services that are secure, fast, and stable for clients.
2007 saw us form a partnership to Userscape, Inc., the creators of HelpSpot, an advanced web-based helpdesk application. This collaboration focuses on hosting services for a market that is in critical need of all three of our business focus areas, Performance, Security, and Stability.
We expanded our data center to include a third location in 2008 with the goal of disaster recovery and offsite backups over private metro-optical Ethernet connections. For better performance and security, this data center is linked directly to the primary data center. It does not rely on routing over the public Internet for data transit. This data center also houses our support/help desk system.
EngineHosting.com remained focused on its primary objectives in 2009 by moving their infrastructure to the cloud using all the latest technologies from VMware vSphere. These included automatic high availability and "Live migration", of any service, between storage arrays or physical servers, as well as the complete separation of services from our infrastructure's underlying hardware.
We will continue to provide solutions for clients and push the boundaries of what we can do in 2009 and beyond.
Lead Staff
Julie Lau, Majority Partner and Director of Operations
While she was completing her 1995 BA in Biochemistry from Mills College and continuing with the Department of Immunology of the Mayo Clinic, her web development experience began in college. Now, she holds a Masters in Science degree in Immunology at the Mayo Graduate School. She continues to love the Internet and makes sure that everything runs smoothly at EngineHosting.
Nevin Lyne, Founding Partner and Director of Technology
Nevin Lyne, who has been working with servers and network in many technology areas for over twenty years, also boasts over 25 years experience using computers and the internet overall. From small business to large corporations like the Mayo Clinic, his clients range from individuals and institutions of all sizes. Gippy's Internet Solutions was founded by Nevin in 1998. It provides web hosting services. Nevin is the founder of EngineHosting and Director of Technology. He has a lot of experience, as well as a demonstrated commitment to his clients.
Laurie Ruggles, Director of Client Operations
Laurie started her career in technology over 25 years ago as an analyst and technical user advocate. She then moved on to technical writing and operations management. Laurie is constantly working to enhance the EngineHosting experience, including developer and support relations.
An Overview of Network Infrastructure
EngineHosting is based in 4 data centers that are state of the art in North America.
Each data center location has redundant, highly secured infrastructure that helps to ensure your computer is always up, seven days a week.
Network Infrastructure
Every data center has at least three connections to the top upstream providers. Each upstream provider can be connected to with up to GigE connectivity. This is combined with redundant and internal network infrastructure for reliable and high-performance web hosting.
Climate Control Regulation
The HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system has full humidity control. Each data center is kept at the right temperature and humidity to make sure that servers work at peak performance.
Backup Power Systems
To ensure uptime, we do not depend on the local power grid. The power conditioning provided by our data centers' diesel-powered generators on site and central UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) ensures uninterrupted hosting data center operation. Regular testing of the generators and UPSs is done to ensure that they are ready for use in an emergency.
Data Center Security
All other personnel are restricted from access to our network infrastructure and server, which is kept in a locked cabinet or private space. The facilities are monitored by closed circuit TV and security personnel. They also use multiple layers of biometric fingerprint units, proximity + pin code, and/or swipe card security to ensure additional security.
Monitors available 24 hours a day, around the world
The Network Operations Center (NOC), staff monitors network and server infrastructures 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 jours a year. Our own monitoring system for inter-data center connectivity is used, along with third party solutions that use multiple locations around the world. In the case of a major emergency, our senior network engineers will be available. To better suit their needs and corporate policies, our dedicated web solution clients have the option to choose from several Support SLA agreements.
EngineHosting offers both managed load-balanced hosting and dedicated server solutions that offer peace of mind year-round.
Locate Data Centers
* Minneapolis, Minnesota (primary)
* Edina, Minnesota (support)
* Fremont, California (secondary)
* Reston (secondary).
Monitor Station Locations
* Houston, TX
* Amsterdam (Netherlands)
* Hong Kong (China)
* Sydney (Australia)
* Sao Paulo, Brazil
Our advantage
You can expand with highly scalable managed hosting plans. You can choose from basic shared hosting options to highly-scalable load-balanced dedicated servers to help you support large-scale and mission-critical applications like ExpressionEngine or Helpspot, as well as other CMS and e-commerce applications.
Load-Balanced
Our load-balanced clustering technology allows groups of servers to collaborate to provide web and e-mail services to our clients. F5 load-balancers monitor the performance of each server in a cluster and forward traffic requests to the server which is responding to requests the fastest. Requests are passed to the other cluster servers if one server in a cluster responds too slowly or is not responsive at all. This ensures that requests are dealt with quickly and accurately.
Performance Tuned
We constantly evaluate and monitor our dedicated and shared web hosting services. We have years of experience in managing dynamically generated websites and are able to provide the best possible performance from our server network.
It is possible to scale
As their website needs change, clients can quickly and easily move between the different hosting options. Clients can seamlessly migrate between simple web hosting and complex, load-balanced dedicated server solutions. Our web hosting clusters are easily upgraded, and new servers can be added anytime. This allows us to grow our clusters without impacting performance or uptime.
Fast Networks
All data centers are equipped with redundant GigE/OC12 connections or higher to the internet through top transit providers. Our servers and computers are also interconnected with, at a minimal, GigE Ethernet. Our servers and clusters have been assigned to specific tasks, allowing us to optimize our systems and improve performance. Our web servers clusters can handle different services, such as email accounts. This is in sharp contrast to hosting companies that run every service associated with one web site from one server.
Business Access
Everything we integrate into our network has been designed to maximize performance and availability, including our Tipping point Intrusion Prevention System, Juniper SSG Firewalls and F5 Network load-balancers and Netapp storage arrays. This allows customers to have consistent performance, regardless of load or traffic, and uninterrupted service even in the event of a hardware malfunction. Software and hardware upgrades can also be done with virtually zero downtime thanks to clustering.
For in-house support
Our clients are supported directly by our staff. There is no outsourcing of support to call centers or handling support emails by individuals unfamiliar with our network and systems. Our staff responds directly to all client support inquiries. This allows us to provide factual information about your website, servers, network and any other issues related to the services we offer to clients.