NVMe hardware raid now available at XLHost

PCIe NVMe SSDs have been available for enterprise/datacenter deployments for several years. With the performance of the typical NVMe SSD being ten to fifteen times greater than the average SATA SSD it has been very tempting to deploy these drives for applications that require a lot of IOPs, storage throughput, or both. Up until now using NVMe drives in servers has come with compromises related to resiliency and overall performance. While the drives themselves have redundant NAND flash memory, the drives could still fail in a number of ways which could impact the availability of applications.

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Celebrating 20 years in the cloud

It has been more than 20 years since XLHost began hosting amazing content and applications for our thousands of awesome customers in more than 130 countries. Everyone at XLHost is tremendously excited about this milestone and we thought that it might be fun to look back at some of the history of our company and how it has evolved since 1995.

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From server to dedicated server service -- The facilities

It is a beautiful spring day at the XLHost campus in Columbus, OH so I will admit that I was looking for an excuse to get outside and enjoy it. One of the big questions we get from customers is what really goes into hosting dedicated servers? In this series of articles we will try to help you understand how XLHost takes a lowly pile of servers and turns it into a dedicated server service with a brief look (inside and out) at the XLHost datacenter in Columbus, OH.

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Choosing the right dedicated server platform

If you have already decided that you are going to host your application on a dedicated server, the next question you will want to answer is which dedicated server is right for you. In this article we will try to make it easier to understand some of the differences between the various server platforms XLHost uses. This article is the first in a multi-part series where we will cover all aspects of dedicated server hardware.

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Maximizing delivery of emails sent from your dedicated servers

Thanks to the bombardment of spam that is levied towards business and consumer inboxes it is becoming increasingly difficult for legitimate marketing and transactional email messages to reach the hallowed inbox. XLHost gets questions frequently regarding email delivery and I want to share with you some best practices I have learned and free tools that you can use to ensure that the email you send from your dedicated servers gets delivered to the inbox.

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Choosing the right SSDs for your dedicated servers

SSDs have been generally available for mainstream enterprise and consumer use since about 2008. As the average price per GB of SSD rapidly declines and the performance, reliability, and endurance continues to increase; many enterprises are turning to SSD storage as a way of delivering the data their applications need to achieve outstanding performance.

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Is your dedicated server being used for DDoS attacks?

First, let me welcome you to the new XLHost blog and introduce myself. I am Drew Weaver, Chief Technical Officer at XLHost. If you're a customer of XLHost we have most likely interacted at some point in the past. I have been with XLHost since 1999 and it is basically my job to oversee the operation of anything that has a blinking light and make sure that our amazing technical support staff continues to be the best in the industry. My posts will likely tend to skew towards technical matters so bare with me if my geekness shines through. (I will try to keep it in check)

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