Future Hosting Technical FAQ

1. What is the difference between SATA•II and SATA•I hard drives?
SATA II is a newer technology with the following advantages:

PERFORMANCE
- High interface transfer rates
- SATA II - 3.0 Gbps interface
- Rotational Vibration Safeguard
- Faster system boot-up
- 300MB/s burst data rate for faster data access
- Optimum performance in multi-drive systems
RELIABILITY
- ECC and CRC protection
- Optional low-power mode
- Load/unload ramp
- Internal thermal sensor
- Data integrity enhanced throughout circuits
- Reduces system heat/cooling requirements
- Enables industry-leading acoustics
- Protects user data when power is removed
- Improves data integrity

2. What is RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)?
RAID is a type of disk, where several physical disks are combined into an array for better speed and fault tolerance. RAID 0 implements data striping where file blocks are written to separate drives. RAID 0 does not provide fault tolerance, because failure of one drive will result in data loss. RAID 1 implements data mirroring. Data is duplicated on two drives either through software or hardware. It provides faster read performance than a single drive. Future Hosting offers hardware RAID level's 0, 1, 5 and 10. Future Hosting utilizes a 3Ware 9550SX Raid controller as well as Adaptec RAID controllers for all RAID solutions deployed.

3. What is Port Speed?
Port speed is measured in bits per second. A bit per second (bps) is a way of measuring how fast data is moved from one place to another. For example a 28.8 modem can move 28,800 bits per second. The port speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps) or gigabits per second (Gbps). This is the maximum amount of data that can pass through the port at a given second. At Future Hosting, you can upgrade your port speed from 10Mbps to 100Mbps or even 1Gbps on both the Public and Private Network connections.

4. What is NAS (Network Attached Storage)?
You are allotted a certain amount of space on a backup server, to which you will send important data via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for storage. It is fully manual, meaning customers will perform their own backups whenever needed.

5. What is a VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network)?
A VLAN is a logical grouping of two or more servers which are not necessarily on the same physical network segment but which share the same IP network subnet. The advantage to passing traffic across a VLAN versus a LAN is that information on one VLAN can only be seen on that VLAN, and not by every server on the entire LAN. This is especially beneficial when you have many different nodes on a network sharing information with each other, and not every server is owned by the same customer as is the case with Future Hosting. It allows us to provide our customers with more secure inter-server communication.

6. What is DNS (Domain Name System)?
A domain name is an easy-to-remember address that can be translated by DNS into server's IP address. DNS is the Internet service that maps Internet domains into corresponding IP addresses. DNS database is distributed and replicated among many DNS servers, so when you change your domain's IP address, the changes take a while to propagate.

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