Edge Server Hosting - Edge Servers by Data Center Location

The term Edge Server Hosting comes from Edge Computing. It describes a hosting service delivered from an edge data center - a facility located as close as possible to the user of the data and application service being consumed.
A key parameter of edge hosting is the round-trip delay (latency) for requests and data traveling between Internet users and the server providing services to them. A server is considered an edge node if it provides a delay of 1 ms to 5 ms - the shorter, the better.

Your Edge Dedicated Server is a Bare-Metal or a Cloud Server that:
a) is hosted in a data center physically close to your application users and customers
b) provides the lowest possible round-trip delay for application delivery (typically less than 5 milliseconds).
Your Edge server environment can be used as:
a) Edge dedicated server with OS installed directly on the physical (bare-metal) server; or
b) As an infrastructure node that hosts virtual servers created with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) virtualization technology in Ubuntu 20 (or Ubuntu 22). VMM allows you to create and use Virtual Machines (VMs) that run a Linux distribution or Windows OS.

Edge Bare Metal Server providers offer the following levels of security with their dedicated hosting services:
1. Physical Environment Security
Physical environment security refers to all physical aspects of the data center facilities used to house Edge dedicated servers. This includes the resilience against natural disasters, the physical design of the data center and the way the server rooms and cabinets are organized, as well as power redundancy, Internet network redundancy, and overall business continuity.
2. Network Security
Network security is part of the overall data center communications architecture. It includes the redundancy of fiber connectivity routes and the wide choice of ISPs and interconnection options.
3. Physical Server Security
This can also be referred to as "Bare Metal Server Security". It refers to the specific hardware components and configurations of the server that increase its uptime. These include the number of power supplies (PSUs) used, the number and capacity of network interface cards (NICs), the number and specification of hard drives used (SATA, SAS, SSD, NMVe, etc.), the use of RAID controllers, the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI, also known as ILO and iDrac by server vendors) for remote network access to the edge bare metal server, etc.
As a provider of Edge Bare Metal Servers, HC automatically covers the highest possible industry standards regarding "Physical Environment Security" and "Network Security". Physical Server Security is a customizable element of the dedicated hosting server that is selected by the user of the physical server (i.e. the customer).
Most of our Edge dedicated servers include the following "Physical Server Security" by default:

• Redundant Power Supplies (PSUs)
• At least 2 x 1 Gbps physical Network Interface Cards (NICs)
• Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and IPMI capabilities, except for the Edge servers, which are shipped with SSH management access only and are not recoverable in the event of an operating system (OS) failure that renders the server inoperable

Yes, there are no limits on the inbound and outbound Internet traffic (data transfer) on your bare metal server which is hosted in our edge data centers. There are also no data transfer fees. Each Edge Bare Metal server comes with a certain physical capacity of the Internet connection port - 5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 20 Gbps, or 30 Gbps - chosen by the server owner. Server owners are free to transfer data up to the full capacity of the Internet connection port they selected when they signed up. If the server user selected a 5 Gbps connection port at sign-up, they can upgrade to 10 Gbps, 20 Gbps, or 30 Gbps, depending on the network interface available on the bare-metal server.

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks typically result in service unavailability and thousands of dollars in data transfer service fees, especially if you host your IT infrastructure with one of the major hyperscale cloud providers.
HostColor's DDoS-protected Edge bare metal servers minimize the risk of service unavailability and virtually eliminate the risk of you incurring data transfer costs as a result of artificial, bot-generated traffic to your server instances.
When you use our Edge bare-metal servers, your applications run behind sophisticated DDoS protection firewalls, maximizing application availability. Our natural, enterprise-grade, DDoS-protected networks safeguard your Dallas dedicated server from unexpected network downtime, preventing loss of business and revenue. Our DDoS-protected network services filter out malicious traffic and ensure that legitimate traffic requests reach your servers and applications. Specifically, our DDoS protection includes the following capabilities:

• Real-time mitigation of malicious attacks
• Human-generated traffic that reaches your edge bare metal server
• Native protection against network attacks of any size
• No additional fees or charges for DoS and DDoS protected servers and infrastructure
• No fees for bot-generated and malicious traffic on all unmetered edge servers and edge dedicated clouds
• No increased latency and long round-trip delays in application delivery in the event of a network attack
• All IPv4 and IPv6 settings are protected from DDoS attacks

Yes! Each server has four (4x) 25-gigabit network interfaces configured for redundancy on 2 separate NIC cards. All four interfaces are placed into a single link access group (LAG) and utilize LACP for individual link monitoring. Your Edge Dedicated Server is connected to two network switches with two (2x) 25-gigabit connection links to the first switch and two (2x) 25-gigabit to the second switch. Each network switch has multiple 100-gigabit fiber connections to the data center's network architecture that features failover protection. The overall networking architecture sustains full data transfer capacity with the failure of any single networking appliance or link. The data transfer from the Edge data centers to either the public Internet or the MPLS IP VPN network is secured by two diverse routers for each network. The routers are connected to a pair of network switches. The data transfer can be forwarded through both routers and will switch over automatically upon failure of any networking device.

You can create and deploy a dedicated cloud infrastructure on a single Linux-based Edge bare-metal server or a cluster of such servers. The Edge Bare Metal Servers can run the Ubuntu operating system using the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) virtualization technology in Ubuntu OS.
If you need HostColor's help to create a cloud computing architecture, we can help you design, deploy and manage it as needed.

Yes. You can create and host dedicated cloud infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes using our Edge Bare Metal servers and host containerized applications on them.
HostColor's Edge Bare Metal infrastructure allows organizations to deploy run, scale up, scale down, and quickly move Docker containers and the containerized applications from one virtual containerized environment to another without interruption. Docker containers are executable software packages that contain everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings.
HC also enables enterprises to deploy a fully isolated, dedicated cloud infrastructure for hosting and orchestrating containerized applications, based on the Kubernetes open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.

All HostColor (HC) Edge servers in feature "Free Infrastructure Support". HC never charges you for access to infrastructure technical support. Unlike the large hyperscaler clouds like AWS, Azure and others, that charge their customers for access to technical support for their bare-metal or cloud infrastructure.
Our infrastructure technical support covers everything related to network interfaces and the core functionality of the physical components of your bare-metal edge server such as CPU, RAM, and storage drives. With our free infrastructure support, you can save money and have access to the technical support you need for the core components and network functions of your Edge bare metal server.
Please note that "Free Infrastructure Support" does not include maintenance or troubleshooting of the Edge Server's operating system (OS), any custom configurations created and maintained by the customer, and any installed software applications.
In addition to the "Free Infrastructure Support" HostColor takes the dedicated hosting services it provides to a new level of reliability with its "Semi-Managed Dedicated Server" support.

While most dedicated hosting providers offer 'Unmanaged' or 'Managed' hosting services, HostColor does 'Semi-Managed' and 'Managed' Edge Servers.

'Unmanaged' means that the client is solely responsible for the management of the edge bare-metal server they have. The provider's responsibility is to make sure that the server network connection works properly and in case of a hardware failure, to fix the failed components, or to replace the whole physical server.
'Managed' means that the provider is responsible for managing the network, the edge server, the installed operating system, and the software environment. The provider does operating system updates, software updates, and other management and configuration tasks on the bare-metal server. In other words unmanaged edge bare metal servers do not feature server-side support and therefore the clients pay for the base infrastructure service. The 'Managed Edge Servers' feature full server-side infrastructure, OS, and software environment support and therefore are more expensive, as the provider's experts commit time and work hours to deliver technical and system administration.
HostColor fills the gap by offering 'Semi-Managed' Edge Servers. 'Semi-Managed' means that our administrators install your preferred OS on the physical server or your preferred virtualization platform to transform the physical server into a Cloud infrastructure. We create a custom technology environment per your requirements and keep on record a description with the 'base desired state' of your edge server. As a part of the 'Semi-Managed' support contract, HostColor reinstalls the server OS per the request and helps the client fix issues and troubleshoot in case of any operating system, networking, or software configuration issues. All 'Semi-Managed' edge bare-metal servers feature up to 30 minutes per month of technical and system administration. Any time spent by HC experts on managing the server OS, software environments, or troubleshooting will be charged at HostColor's standard managed service rates.