It’s not hard for most of us to remember the good old days of dial up internet. While the content being loaded was significantly smaller than it is today, it could still take hours or even days to download some files. Thankfully, those days are long gone and many residential users even have access to speeds up to 1Gbps. But what advancements have been made for server connections?

In the last decade, the Virtual Private Network (VPN) grew from a niche product for businesses into a global consumer service. Propelled by ubiquitous WiFi, constant connectivity, P2P, and increasing awareness of data privacy issues among the general public, the VPN is no longer an arcane piece of networking technology, but a tool many regard as essential to their online safety and enjoyment.

New York City has established itself in recent decades as a hub for business and innovation to North America and beyond. But with so many great locations in the area, why do businesses choose New York City for their server hosting needs?

The marketing language around data centers can be filled with buzz words like “top tier” and “tier 4 data center.” But what do data center tiers actually mean and how does it impact your business? In this article, we’ll outline what each data center tier means so you can make an informed decision. 

When most people hear the city Buffalo, their first thought probably isn’t, “Wow, that sounds like a great city for dedicated hosting.” But Buffalo is in fact trusted by thousands of global enterprises for their New York dedicated hosting needs and it is the location of ServerMania’s flagship data center.

When every business is in the startup process, but especially in the case of SaaS startups, there is often a rush to deploy a large amount of servers to meet the needs of a growing user base. "It was growing so fast that we were constantly about to fall down." Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr recounted on the Startup Podcast, "We literally had the number of the customs agent so they would call us when a shipment of Dell servers arrived so we could run to the colo."

Each year, the need for businesses to have access to reliable and affordable storage servers increases. This could be due to increased regulatory requirements to store customer data for longer periods of time, the importance of data redundancy due to cyber threats or simply because the amount of data we are storing is getting larger. 

When IT professionals hear that criminals have hacked a company’s network via a trivial exploit, we wonder why the victim didn’t have basic security precautions in place. In most cases, businesses aren’t compromised through imaginative social engineering or ingenious and complex multi-layer attacks against hardened defences.