4. Our network is very fast, and very reliable.

4. Our network is very fast, and very reliable.

Our sophisticated self-healing network looks after itself when network conditions change.

We aggregate bandwidth access from the world’s major suppliers. Our 10Gbps Manchester fibre network spans six datacentres, including three of our own.

We monitor our network 24/7, from multiple countries, resolving issues before they affect our service.

We’re willing to prove our uptime. Externally hosted monitoring results are published on our website to ensure you can be confident that we’re telling the truth.

We don’t hide behind a false ‘100% network SLA’ which is achieved by excluding certain things from the calculations.  We guarantee 99.95% network availability and regularly over-achieve as can be seen from our current network uptime statistics:

Year	Availability
2011	100.000%
2010	99.998%
2009	100.000%
2008	99.998%
2007	99.990%
Figures are rounded to 3 decimal places and based on independent, external monitoring.

See just how good it is for yourself

• Do a speed test: A series of large downloadable files is available at http://www.melbourne.co.uk/speedtest.
• See our live uptime statistics: Externally monitored and verified uptime statistics are available by clicking on this link (external site).

More about our Network

Melbourne operates a 10GB/sec fibre-optic metropolitan area network spanning six facilities in Manchester, connecting our three datacentre facilities to the internet.

We connect to multiple upstream bandwidth providers at three different Manchester datacentres, giving us complete independence from the failure of any bandwidth provider or facility.

The below diagram shows our network connectivity between facilities and the upstream providers to which we connect.

A note about resilience

When you’re aiming for 100% uptime, resilience in the network is key. We have a very simple rule: if a device is critical to network availability, there will always be a hot-standby available.

All critical hardware, such as routers and firewalls is duplicated, meaning that the failure of an individual piece of hardware will have minimal impact on the overall running of the network.

We run BGP4 on our network, which means we pick the best routes to any given destination. In the event that the best route is not available, the next best route is chosen.

Monitoring

We take our network uptime and stability very seriously.  As such, we have several levels of monitoring in-place to ensure that any issues are discovered at the earliest possible point, and specifically before they become service-affecting.

Every single router, switch, firewall and managed server is monitored internally.  Any outages are notified to us instantly by e-mail and SMS to our on-call engineer.

In addition, we have external monitoring, which checks our critical routers and firewalls from five different worldwide locations.

For further peace of mind, we monitor saturation on links, with alerts being generated if critical links are acting unusually.  This allows us to very quickly see any potential issues which may be arising, for example attacks, or compromised machines.