SSA Host is the webhosting division of Sirkels & Squares Alternative, and a formalization of services including webhosting that have been offered since 1998. Previous incarnations were targeted towards a specific audience and/or service or need. It was decided that it would be better to bring all this together under one roof and offer the same services with a more organized backing.

We have been offering web-hosting and consulting services since Dec. 2000, mostly to specialized groups and on an individual basis. SSA Host officially came into existence in early June, 2005 after the realization that we could do what we've become good at doing on a larger scale. After running on a limited scale for a year and a half, to work out the kinks in providing and supporting webhosting services to our clients - SSA Host celebrates 6 years of experience by fully opening our services to the public in December, 2006! We continue to consistently provide reliable services and friendly customer support that our clients have been able to depend on.

We strive to do three things extremely well. 1: Provide fast, reliable service you can depend on. 2: Keep our prices extremely affordable. 3: Offer fast, friendly, and knowledgable support. In order to reach these goals, we continuously maintain and monitor our services. We don't oversell our resources, and we don't needlessly indulge ourseves at the customers expense. We love what we do, and we want you to be proud of the services we offer. Our enthusiasm for our work shows in our customer support - both in attitude and knowledge. We also try to make our service easy to use and understand by providing documentation, tutorials, and answers to common questions.

If you can't find the answer to your problem or question online, we have 24x7 support available via our email/ticket system. Most responses are under 30 minutes! More complex issues requiring a server administrator or approval by a member of management are typically handled within a few hours as there's always a manager or server admin on-call and required to respond to escalations from our support center for urgent issues.

Network

As you may already have noticed, we don't operate like the other guys. And this is one of the ways we stand out against the competition. Some may instinctively turn away the moment they hear that SSA Host does not have it's own data center, but please read on to find out why. Yes, it's true we don't own our own mega-square-foot facilities - instead we leave that to those who do it best so we can focus on what we do best. We are experts at providing fast, affordable, and reliable webhosting with excellent customer service.

But don't think this puts us in the little leagues either. The data centers we use are all best in class, with multiple carriers, backup power generators, high security and more. We don't settle for run of the mill colocation services at bargain basement prices. We pay top dollar for high-end, high-class service that puts our service on top. This still cuts out a huge overhead in terms of cost, personnell, and more to run our own facility that we have eliminated from the typical business model. This allows us to focus on maintaining the servers, providing excellent customer service, and keeping our prices low. Plus it allows our servers to be geographically diverse for fault tolerance and to provide even better service for regional hosting needs.

We operate out of 3 different geographically diverse datacenters in the US:

East Coast

The majority of our network comes from the east coast. Our shared hosting servers are located here and we offer both virtual (VPS) and dedicated servers in this location.

Philadelphia, PA (401 N. Broad St.)

Located in the Building of the Americas, at 401 North Broad Street in Philadelphia, PA, USA, has a unique history that has positioned it as one of the most secure and structurally stable data centers in the world. Constructed in the early 1900.s by the Department of Defense, the Building of the Americas was specifically designed to withstand the rigors associated with the production of tanks assembled during World War I and II.

The location of the building was chosen by the Department of Defense due to its proximity to the National Rail Lines. The building sits directly above the train tunnels which allowed the production crews to drop the finished tanks onto a flatbed train for easy transport. In the 1950's, ATT established a Point of Presence (POP) in the Building of the Americas by constructing a phone services network throughout the train tunnels, subsequently linking into all East Coast phone service traffic.

Today, the train tunnels house fiber optic cable, stretching along the entire East Coast and extending to the far reaches of the globe. As a result, every major carrier has a Point of Presence within this building. The ability to connect to every major carrier gives us tremendous growth potential here, as well as placing us in one of the premier carrier neutral data centers in the world.

The Building of the Americas is fed by two separate power grids. In addition, we have two diesel generators capable of providing power indefinitely in the event of a power outage. All equipment is connected through a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). This data center has N+1 redundancy and is SAS 70 certified. We can also provide DC power to customers who require this unique service.

This facility utilizes a completely redundant network infrastructure consisting of: Dual Juniper M Series routers, Multiple Cisco Switches for the core network, as well as Cisco "edge" switches.

In addition to top of the line hardware, our entire network is run via Gigabit Fiber connectivity. This allows us to move massive amounts of bandwidth, even for the most demanding, bandwidth-intensive needs of our customers.

Facility Features:

• Juniper M Series Routers
• Cisco Core and Edge Switches
• Gigabit Fiber Connectivity
• Multiple Gig-E Fiber Upstream Links
• Level 3
• Global Crossing
• KVM over IP for "out of band" access
• Third Party Monitoring of all network gear
• Dual incoming utility feeds from separate substations off of two isolated grids
• 1200 amp AC switchgear
• N+1 parallel redundant 150 KVA UPS modules
• 2400 amp DC power system
• Dedicated 750 kW standby generator
• Pre-action, dry pipe sprinkler system

Central

We offer virtual private servers and semi-dedicated servers in this location. We also house some of our internal secondary systems here for redundancy and fault tolerance.

Dallas, TX (colo4dallas)

One of the largest colocation facilities in Dallas, this diverse powerful network featuring Level (3), Internap, XO Communications, and Time Warner provides our customers optimum speed and reliability; also offers high speed connectivity from multiple carriers and clean IP addresses in a true carrier neutral environment. Located at the edge of downtown Dallas on one of the most fiber rich routes in the city, colo4dallas maintains a fully-equipped, 28,000 square foot facility that is staffed around the clock. With uncompromising standards for security, power supply and environmental controls, they focus on connectivity, redundancy and resilience.

Facility Features:

• Multiple carriers with diverse building entrances
• Fully redundant Cisco architecture using 12008 routers and 6509 Layer3 switches
• HSRP failover protection
• Dual network feeds to each customer
• Leibert and Powerware UPS with 120, 208, 220VAC available
• Maintainance by-pass
• 2400 amps DC plant
• 100% diesel generator backup with auto start and auto transfer switch
• Generator capacity equal to building utility service
• A and B DC plants totally diverse
• Liebert air
• Under-floor cooling
• Humidity control via Liebert units
• Multiple layers of 24x7 security cameras, card readers, and key pads
• Pre-action sprinkler rated for telecommunication equipment/computer room
• Integrated smoke/heat detector system

West Coast

We offer virtual private servers and semi-dedicated servers in this location. We also house our main websites and support systems here for redundancy and fault tolerance.

Los Angeles, CA (TEL-X)

Located on the corner of Seventh Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, this data center is in the heart of the telecommunication district. This building is a state-of-the-art, 450,000 square foot Mission Critical Datacenter and Telecommunications facility. This site benefits from a robust electrical and HVAC infrastructure and telecom network access. It ranks as one of the most prominent technology facilities and critical data routing hubs in the Western U.S. This powerful network features a BGP blended bandwidth solution that consists of 8 transit providers including Qwest, Sprint, Level 3, Global Crossing, Savvis, PCCW, Tiscali and Teleglobe.

Facility Features:

• Built in 1914; Complete structural upgrade to telecom standards in 1999
• 500,000 square feet (67,000 usable sq ft floor plate area)
• Keycard/biometric scanner, video monitoring/recording/24x7 Security Staff
• 18" raised, 2'x 2' floorplates
• Condenser water source HVAC (configured as N+1); (11) 30-ton units
• Double interlock preaction fire suppression system and heat & smoke detection
• 2500 Amp 480V utility power feed
• 4 1500 kw generators, N+1 paralleled
• Six 300 kVA UPS power plants configured as 2N

Servers

SSA Host manages its own servers for reliability and security. By utilizing existing, well established data center facilities known for their reliability and quality we can focus on maintaining our own systems to provide for the needs of our customers without the added overhead of also running and managing the facility. Our servers primarily run on the CentOS operating system with dual or quad core processors, ample memory, and utilise RAID storage arrays as well as offite backups to safeguard our customers data. Technicians are onsite 24x7 at each of the data centers we use to provide immidiate assistance with hardware or connectivity issues and to perform hot-swaps should any equipment fail.

Our support staff continuously monitor not only each servers availability, but also current resource usage to proactively prevent downtime caused by rogue processes, DDoS attacks, etc.

Each server is fully backed up daily and securely stored offsite for maximum disaster recovery and availability. The last 30 days worth of backups are kept in a secure location. We utilize full hardware and storage array redundancy for our backup systems to further protect your data. With well over 6 Terabytes of data storage currently available and the ability to add capacity at any time should the need arise, your data is safe.