Environment
Limitless’s development and live web servers are based on Unix machines running Linux and Solaris; this provides a highly stable and robust environment, offering substantially greater uptimes and performance than PC-based servers. Our network is configured according to current best practice to protect all the sites hosted on the servers from tampering (although, as with all systems maintained across the Internet, the system is only secure as long as the access passwords are kept restricted). We also operate secure servers, which use encryption to protect the information transmitted from their web site, for those customers who require it.
Development
As part of our normal operating set-up for complex systems, we build both a development and production environments. This allows us to make changes to the development system, to which access is restricted to the specific client for review, without affecting the live production system. Only once updates to the development system have been approved, are they copied over to the live system.
Resilience
Whenever we make changes behind the scenes that might affect performance or reliability, we are able to prove these changes on the duplicate servers we use for development purposes. For example, we started year 2000 testing during 1998 on a system that duplicates the production server configuration, and performing the same mix of work as our development and production servers, but with its clock set exactly one year ahead. This system was running continuously one year ahead, helping us to discover and resolve issues which would otherwise have arisen on our live servers during 2000.
Limitless’s administrative staff have been building and operating complex, business-critical networks based on Unix and Internet protocols for fifteen years, and pride themselves on the reliability and robustness of their systems. Part of this includes continuous service monitoring, which checks that web servers are available and responding, connections to the outside world are functioning properly, and that databases, file systems and other critical resources are operating within acceptable limits. Our staff are available round the clock to respond to system alerts, sent to them by e-mail and through the pager network, and to resolve problems quickly.
Our production network is provided by COLT who are able to offer high-bandwidth and high-reliability connectivity.