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Challenge

CharityVillage.com needed a new partner to host its popular information and job search portal for not-for-profit organizations.

Why eMax Hosting

CharityVillage.com required a fully outsourced hosting solution and a responsive support team that could work closely with its development team to migrate and maintain the site while it is redeveloped.

Solution

CharityVillage.com partnered with Canada Web Hosting (CWH) to deploy, migrate and maintain a new eMax managed hosting infrastructure in CWH's Toronto data center. The eMax system included high availability and disaster recovery features for Windows and SQL Server Technologies.

Key Benefit

• CharityVillage.com able to gain independence from initial development firm.
• CharityVillage.com found a partner to manage the migration and support the redevelopment of their core business application on a robust and scalable platform.

Key eMax Components

• Enterprise ITIL Trained Technical Account Manager and Admin Team
• High Availability (Active/Passive) Cisco CSS Load Balancing Appliances
• Load Balanced Windows Application Servers (Dell PowerEdge 1425s)
• SQL Server Database Servers (Dell PowerEdge 6850)
• Syncsort Backups to High Performance NAS Storage Device

Case study (pdf):   Download

Like most companies that have been on the Internet for many years, they have horror stories to tell about their past hosting providers and were extremely cautious about choosing a new host for their core business applications. After a thorough sourcing process involving a third party, CharityVillage.com found a match in Canada Web Hosting's eMax Managed Hosting Services.

After an intensive pre-sales consulting phase, CharityVillage.com was introduced to their Technical Account Team led by an ITIL trained Technical Account Manager. The Technical Account Manager worked closely with CharityVillage.com's development team to deploy, test and maintain the new system, migrate the site from its existing environment and its ongoing re-development.

The Power behind CharityVillage.com

CharityVillage.com's highly redundant and scalable system is hosted in CWH's Toronto data center. To manage incoming traffic it uses high availability (active/passive) firewall appliances and high availability (active/passive) Cisco CSS load balancers. These load balancers intelligently direct incoming traffic to CharityVillage.com's cluster of Windows application servers. The CSS Load Balancers monitor the applications servers and will automatically redirect traffic away from a problem node in the cluster. If total load on the cluster increases beyond N-1 then additional nodes can be quickly added to the application cluster to ensure redundancy with no downtime. Conversely, a problematic node can be removed from the cluster at any time with no impact on the web site. Behind these applications servers stands a highly redundant and scalable quad-processor SQL Server Machine.

In addition to its production Windows application and database servers, CharityVillage.com uses an Exim mail appliance custom built by CWH to reliably deliver its newsletters and notices to its many members. Like most of CWH's customers, CharityVillage.com makes use of CWH's Qmail cluster to handle its POP and Web mail requirements because of its robust architecture and multi-layer spam filtering systems.

Standing beside CharityVillage.com's production servers are a number of supporting machines including a staging web and staging database server on which to test development work before releasing it into production. The entire system is fully managed by their Technical Account Team at CWH.

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