Connectivity

The type of connectivity used can range from a single channel ISDN line to multiple DS-3 connections. Connectivity is just as important as servers used. Without enough bandwidth to serve all clients, all other features are useless and therefore unimportant. If download time of your website is an important consideration (it should be!), then connectivity of the hosting provider is one of the most important considerations. In summary, you should never host your website on any connection less than a full T-1 line without redundancy.

Colchis utilizes 3 separate DS-3 connections to diverse Internet carriers. Below are our upstream providers and their respective rating according to BoardWatch Magazine.*

	Provider	Ranking
Primary Provider:	UUNet (MCI/WorldCom)	#1
Secondary Provider:	Savvis Communications	#4
Tertiary Provider:	Frontier GlobalCenter	#23

* Data collected independently by Boardwatch Magazine's Directory of Internet Service Provders, Volume III, Number 2 (Winter 1998 - Spring 1999), Page 26-29. Copyright MecklerMedia Corporation.

Colchis has the capacity to use up to 695 Megabytes of data, well over the bandwidth needed to serve Yahoo!'s 12 million plus visitors every day, or Microsoft's website. Colchis currently has use of an OC-12 and an OC-3. While we have this much bandwidth available, we are not using anywhere near this bandwidth. Our policy is for our 95th percentile of bandwidth consumption to never exceed 70% utilization. When this happens, bandwidth is upgraded.

Redundancy in upstream connections is very important. We have fiber coming into the facilities from 3 different points of entry. Equally important, if any one or even two points are cut, the other connection has the current capacity to transfer all data down the remaining single path.

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