How our IPS Protects our Customers

When we hire a new cloud hosting support engineer the first thing I like to let them know is that their job is exciting as they’ll be involved in cutting edge technologies. It’s a challenging job as every day they’ll be faced with a new issue they probably haven’t handled before and also a rewarding job because they’ll get to hear the relief on the other end when they solve a problem for someone. At the end of the day, ultimately they’re very much like a Navy Seal Team. That usually follows with a “what do you mean?” and my response is: You’re someone hired that’s highly trained to do a specific job of supporting our customers, you’re the unknown force that gets in, gets the job done and gets out before anyone knows you were there.  You’re part of a small team of specialized engineers that were put together to do a specific job.  Your ability to quickly resolve issues for our clients (frequently the IT manager, web developer or web designer) before their boss/customer knows there was an issue is what makes you great.  In fact, if you can keep the peace and not let these issues ever even happen, even better! In my opinion, our support team is very much the Seal Team of Cloud Hosting.

Like any highly trained specialized team, they have been equiped with the best tools and technology available. Which leads me to the tools we use to get our job done. Something that is often overlooked (and pretty much unknown) by many customers is the protection and security efforts we take to protect our 10,000 customers, 35,000 domains and 2500 server instances. A key component of this protection is our deployment of Corero TopLayer IPS / anti-DDOS appliances.  Very few hosting providers actually deploy this type of appliance in their network and usually struggle with network attacks and zero-day vulnerabilities whereas we’re able to either block them before they ever become an issue or in the event they are an issue quickly identify and stop them.  Thanks to such a device, what takes other hosts hours (or days), frequently takes us a few minutes at most.

Dan Farrell, our Director of Network Operations, sat down recently with the folks from Corero and discussed this on camera so I thought how better to share more than to include the video.

Hope you enjoy learning just a little more about the protection your service is automatically behind.