Dependability From the Ground Up
When selecting where to host your web presence, reliability, in addition to your site aesthetics, should be a factor of paramount concern. Here are 6 reasons why Squarespace is unlike any other hosting service you've ever experienced:
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Every Squarespace site is hosted not on a single server, but a cluster of servers.
This means that if we have a web server completely crash for an hour — your site visitors won't even get logged out of their session, much less notice that your site was on a server that crashed. Our enterprise class load balancers and clustering software redirects your traffic seamlessly to a live server. At other hosts, this sort of situation is totally impossible. Your data is likely located on a single server, which is prone to failures and isn't replicated to other active machines.
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Unlike other providers, no end users can run code on our servers.
The fact that we wrote all of the components that are used on your Squarespace site means not only that we can optimize the code to run extremely efficiently and take advantage of our clustered resources — no poorly written user code can consume our hardware. On traditional shared web hosts, you'll be sharing a virtual system with potentially hundreds of users. Take a look at any web host's downtime log to see daily messages detailing how "user X consumed Y resources, causing a server reboot" or "user X had to have script Y stopped". That can't happen here — ever. Every piece of code here is expertly crafted by us to be fast and reliable.
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Traffic spikes to your site are handled automatically.
Because our underlying architecture is clustered — all user sites are hosted using all of our available web servers. Linked on Digg? Slashdotted? The traffic generated from these links is nothing compared to what the thousands of sites hosted on Squarespace see in a single, normal day. A normal day for the architecture serving your Squarespace site is serving tens of millions of hits. Compare this to the crippling effect this would have on your slice of resources on a shared web host — you wouldn't stay online long enough to receive the traffic from your press.
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Squarespace relies on commercial software, where appropriate, for particular applications.
Open source is awesome. We use Tomcat and Linux for our web appliances, and numerous other packages across our systems. But there are some other areas in our architecture — such as storage architecture, clustering software (see the above), servers, and databases where we don't go the cheap route. This saves us the downtime associated with "figuring out" the little quirks of certain software applications that can lead to downtime.
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Squarespace is hosted at Peer1 Network in New York City.
On the web, some bandwidth is cheap bandwidth, and some is expensive — the cost difference comes down to reliability. Some web hosts who run single servers connected to unreliable upstream providers can offer very large bandwidth at dirt cheap prices. There's a reason for that: those hosts didn't pay a lot for their uplinks. Squarespace is on the other end of the spectrum — we required world-class hosting.
We don't run our own data center — we aren't experts at that. We're experts at software. We rely on real datacenter experts — Peer1 Network — for our connectivity and power sources. It isn't cheap — the bandwidth at a world class data center costs more than commodity grade co-location facilities that are prone to power and network failures. How good is Peer1? They not only remained online during the NYC blackout a few years ago — but were nice enough to lend their power to some neighbors in need.
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We've been doing this for years.
Unlike many startup companies in the web world — Squarespace has been in business and hosting web sites for over 3 years. During that time, we've optimized and improved our platform to take into account the many things we've seen happen with our customer web sites. We're debt free, we host thousands of sites, and our business model works — all important factors to consider when selecting a company to handle your web presence. Contrast this with the many debt-laden companies and non-sensical business models that are somewhat prevalent on today's web. It's important to trust the business foundation your providers are built on.
What's this all mean?
Anyone interested in hosting a serious website not only needs, but requires the infrastructure we've built out over the past 3 years of business. Think about it: If a traditional web host is partitioning you a slice of a machine with 100 other users on it — how can that possibly compare to hosting using a fully clustered, redundant, and distributed system like Squarespace can provide you with? Not to mention, of course, the incredible content management system that comes with all of this.
Can this infrastructure fail? Of course, even the best systems have points of failure. But proactive, per-minute monitoring systems notifies administrators via mobile phone messages in the event of any service disruption. We're always watching, and we take our infrastructure very seriously.
