We’re RackNet and we provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Infrastructure as in hosting and service as in we love you.

Infrastructure?

When we talk about Infrastructure as a Service, the infrastructure we’re talking about is all the technology, networking, buildings, security, cooling and everything else you need to invest in to host your service on a server that’s connected to the world via the web.

It’s web infrastructure.

As a service?

When we say ‘as a service’, we mean that by using our service you can deploy a server and connect it with to the whole world in just a few minutes, without having to build an entire infrastructure yourself. Or you can talk to us about a custom infrastructure for the cloud-based service you’re building. The one that’s going to revolutionize the way we live our lives. Whatever floats your boat.

Essentially it means there’s a bunch friendly experts in our Montreal offices waiting for you to call, who will help you find the right infrastructure – and there are lots of options – and set it all up for you so you can just get started from wherever you work.

So that’s it, Infrastructure as a Service!

Why not do it myself?

Well, building a server and connecting it to the internet doesn’t sound that hard right? Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that, if you want to do it properly. To achieve the bandwidth that you need for a typical dedicated web server or cloud server, you need some serious infrastructure. You need to rent fiber optic cables and you need to link them to global communication networks.

Sounds a bit harder right? Not to mention expensive? Well, actually you need to do all that twice.

Do it all twice?

Redundancy is when there is no single point of failure. If you have a single network connection and it fails, you lose your service. But not if you have two connections. For that to happen both of your redundant network connections would need to fail – that’s pretty unlikely if it’s all managed properly (RackNet has 100% network uptime for about 1 year).

Redundancy needs to be there throughout the whole infrastructure, including the power supplies, switches and… well, everywhere.

Is it expensive?

Yes, it’s very expensive to do it yourself. It would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up your hardware and networking, even if you already have space for the servers. And that’s before you factor in the price of electricity to power and cool your servers, and the people to maintain the whole infrastructure.

With an IaaS provider it’s cheaper, certainly if you don’t have a huge scale operation, and certainly in the short term. That’s because of scale and experience economies – basically it’s cheaper for our customers because our very highly-trained and experienced experts do everything for lots of people at once, instead of everyone doing their own thing and making costly mistakes. We also have newly updated hardware, servers and networking – so your infrastructure stays up to date with new technology.

With IaaS it’s also a recurring monthly cost rather than a huge capital expenditure (i.e. it’s a bit more flexible because you pay monthly rather than investing tons of cash up front).

What else is good about IaaS?

Well, using an IaaS provider is quicker and a little easier to do. All the infrastructure stuff? You don’t even need to think about it. You can have a cloud server live in about two minutes and have adedicated server live in about 15 minutes. Free setup, 30-day money back guarantee, 100% uptime guarantee and 24/7 support. Plus all those cables, switches, decisions, finance etc etc done for you.