Enterprise-class Cloud-Based Hosting

GCN has designed the the first cloud-based hosting infrastructure that is specifically engineered for magazine publishers and associations.

The concept of cloud computing, or spreading an application load across a mesh of dedicated, redundant servers, is an emerging field in the technology world, one that is actively being expanded by companies like Google and Amazon.

GCN took these core technologies, which were designed for large server farms with thousands of nodes, and scaled them down so that they can be used by any size magazine publisher at price points that are comparable to or sometimes lower than the cost of a single dedicated server. We provide enterprise-class stability and redundancy at price points that every publisher can afford.

FIGURE 1: Our popular mirrored micro configuration ensures 100-percent up-time for mission-critical publiation web sites and web site tools.

If you currently have your sites hosted on a dedicated server and that server goes down, whether because of a component failure, security breech, or even user error, your sites are down for hours or even days. You're losing impressions. And worst of all, your advertisers are missing out on inventory that can never be recovered. With a cloud-based infrastructure, your sites can never go down, because there is no single point of failure that will disrupt service. This means peace of mind for you, and peace of mind for your advertisers.

GCN has been building cloud-based publishing solutions for much of our 13 years in business, solutions that we deployed for our development clients. Now, we're taking that same great infrastructure and making it available to all publishing companies, even those who have in-house development teams or who have hired other development firms to build their web-based applications.

We at GCN pioneered the use of redundant, dedicated micro-servers for every one of our clients using a primary/fail-over capability that ensures 100-percent up-time no matter what happens. For greater scalability, we offer clients clusters of two, four or as many as 16 dedicated micro-servers spread across a number of hardware nodes in our data center or across the world.

Micro-servers are dedicated processing units with their own operating systems, root or administrative access—even their own unique IP address—that can be moved dynamically from hardware node to hardware node with little or no down-time. This approach means no outages—scheduled or otherwise—for maintenance, hardware upgrades—anything at all. You can rest assured that your sites are up and running regardless of what happens, and that the appropriate resources will be dedicated to your needs when needed.

Our main data center is housed in a secure facility in Somerville, MA, and has aggregate of 4.35 Gbytes of redundant Internet access through six, tier-1 backbone providers. Traffic is dynamically load balanced across those providers to ensure that visitors to your site traverse the quickest path to your site.

The data center features fully-redundant fiber rings, redundant generators, redundant battery-backed UPS systems, redundant connections to the local power grid and even fully-redundant HVAC units to ensure that no matter what happens, your sites will continue to operate and service your readers and advertisers. The location of our data center was chosen because it is outside a major metropolitan area and is therefore less likely to suffer an interruption in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist event.

FIGURE 2: Load balancing allows us to scale your site’s traffic across multiple micro-servers.

FIGURE 3: Geographic load balancing allows us to direct traffic to servers that are closer to your readers.

Our enterprise-class hosting mesh is uniquely positioned to provide your sites with unparalleled resiliency and scalability to meet even the most demanding needs.
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We also offer clients the ability to expand their cloud to locations in Chicago and Los Angeles, where locally-based micro-servers can provide additional redundancy, scalability, and increased performance through our geographically balanced hosting infrastructure. This approach ensures that a web visitor from the west coast is served content on your site from a server that is geographically closest to his or her location, enhancing the user experience and reducing the load on your main hosting infrastructure.

No other hosting company serving the publishing industry provides this type of cloud-based hosting with its inherently high level of redundancy. This is why we have been chosen to host mission-critical web sites for CMP Media, Keller Publishing, Questex, B2BMediaCo, Atlantic Communications, Haymarket, BPA Worldwide, and more.­

For more information, contact Sean Fulton, VP of Technology at 203.665.6211, x203.