Availability and “Availability” are Two Different Things!

When selecting and using our hardware and network connections, we place special emphasis on highest availability and performance. We invest consciously into the highest available quality. This is true for both our application server and our redirecting infrastructure. That pays off – especially for our customers!

For this, we make use of the services of two leading premium hosters and thus host two regionally and organizationally separate high-performance computing centers located in Cologne and Strasbourg (both EU). Our redirecting servers are designed with complete multiple redundancies. The distribution of the traffic between the computing centers takes place through a global network of name servers, so that the queries are alwas handled by the computing center that is most optimal for the user. In the computing centers themselves, we rely on the redundantly designed load balancers of the market leader in this segment. This promises almost 100% reliability, so that no view or click is lost.

Our Availability

According to the monitoring service ServerGuard24, which gives measurements from 5 locations in Germany every minute (i.e. one measurement every 12 seconds), we were able to achieve the following availabilities in 2010 (January 1 to December 31):

  • The application (GUI, Database, Backend) was reachable for 99.94%. This corresponds to a total downtime of just 1 hours and 26 minutes in the whole year!
  • The redirector had an availability of 99.99%, which corresponds to a downtime of just 35 minutes in the whole year!

You can have a look yourself at the live availability of Refined Ads redirectors in the past 12 months, measured by ServerGuard24:

Verfügbarkeit Redirector im letzten Jahr

Our Performance

In addition to availability, performance also plays an important role, i.e. the response times to queries. Long response times create, apart from a bad user experience, a negative impact on the Google Quality Score. In 2010 (January 1 to December 31), we were able to achieve the following performance values in comparison to our market competitors, as measured by ServerGuard24:

  • Response time of the Refined Ads redirector: 0.08 seconds
  • Response time of the redirector of German market competitors: 0.23 seconds
  • Response time of the redirector of US market competitors: 0.42 seconds

Have your own look at the live response times of our redirector in the past month, as measured by ServerGuard24:

Performance Redirector im Dezember 2010

By the way: Sustainability is very important to us!

Green is important! In addition to the use of electricity from renewable energy sources in our office, we host our application server in Europe’s greenest computing center. With the best PUE value (Power Usage Efficiency) of 1.21, it is the most energy-saving and environment-friendly computing center in Europe and thus saves more than 66% of energy when compared with an average computing center. All our servers – in Cologne, too – operate on electricity from renewable energy sources.

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