Behind seven locks: How a hosting and cloud services provider works

Most of us have been online for a long time: we shop in online stores, visit relatives using Skype and send only emails. What's there: many of our grandparents have been chatting on social networks for a long time. The global web has firmly entangled the globe and is entrenched in our daily lives. But have many people thought about where the sites that we use every day are located? Or, using professional vocabulary, are they hosted?

Let's say you decided to start a blog. you found a freelancer who wrote you some html pages, and you want your friends to be able to visit them. Of course, you can run such a site from home on a regular computer. However, to do this, you will have to install special software on it, connect to the top tariff of your Internet provider and keep the computer constantly turned on under a powerful fan so that it does not burn down. And now imagine that not only friends, but also work colleagues, acquaintances from the gym and even an unknown Vitaly from Voronezh began to read your blog. The power of your PC alone will no longer be enough, and the blog will "fall" under the onslaught of visitors. Whoosh — and millions of views, fantasized by you, flow through your fingers! And now you are already typing in a search engine query: "Reliable hosting provider".

A hosting provider is a company that has a special infrastructure, equipment and personnel and makes it possible to host websites, databases, various software and applications "on its side", guaranteeing their constant operation. In recent years, more and more organizations and private users have resorted to the services of such companies. Why? To answer this question, we learned how Selectel, Russia's largest provider of hosting and cloud services, works.

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There is a severe access regime at the entrance: after all, the provider works with such an important resource in our time as information. In addition, among its clients are banks, payment systems and other companies that impose the most stringent requirements for data storage security. Selectel has a PCI DSS certificate as evidence that it is a real information Fort Knox.

The provider's main office is located on the ground floor of a four-storey data center, the largest and most modern in St. Petersburg, as well as one of the best in Russia. Programmers, system administrators, network engineers, pre-sale managers, marketers and other specialists work here.

Information about the status of all data center systems flows to the central control room. Modern servers are very demanding of working conditions: they require constant temperature and humidity, reliable high-speed Internet connection, uninterrupted power supply, etc. It is possible to provide ideal conditions only in data centers specially designed for this purpose. Selectel has as many as six of them.

We go up a floor above and find ourselves in a technological landscape. Before entering the server rooms, you need to put on shoe covers: dust and dirt from shoes have a bad effect on the performance of equipment. If you have to do it manually in polyclinics, then a robot is responsible for it in Selectel. There have been no cases of shoe cover attacks on people yet.

And here is the heart of the company — server. Servers work here under the supervision of system engineers and provider administrators. Today there are almost 30 thousand of them in Selectel data centers. In total, they consume about 12 MW of electricity — like a provincial town or a sleeping area of a megalopolis.

Let's now use the example of Selectel to figure out what services a hosting provider can offer.

Cloud server. The most affordable type of hosting. A virtualization system is installed on a productive physical server with a large amount of memory, with the help of which its resources are divided between several cloud servers. Each cloud server is an independent machine, only its owner has access to it. Modern server processors have built-in virtualization support, so Selectel's Vscale cloud servers work stably and reliably. They can be recommended to owners of simple websites or blogs, small online stores and other web projects that are not too demanding of resources.

Virtual private cloud. For serious tasks — launching business applications, working with Big Data, supporting a complex web resource - a serious tool is needed: a virtual private cloud. In it, the client receives a personal pool of resources and manages them independently. Without contacting the provider's technical support, you can change the number of virtual machines, cores and memory, organize local networks, etc. A virtual private cloud gives you access to unlimited resources at any time. By doing this, it can seriously help startups cope with rapid growth.

Dedicated server. Those who deal with a large amount of data, resource-intensive projects or applications that cannot be hosted in the cloud, it is better to rent a dedicated server. This is a separate physical server located in the provider's data center. The tenant gets all the rights to manage it within a couple of hours.

Selectel creates all services by its own developers. For example, it took a year and a half of painstaking work to work on a virtual private cloud. It is built on the OpenStack open platform, since open software is part of the Selectel ideology. The provider not only uses such software products, but also opens access to its best practices.

Today, a user's request reaches the server hosting the site almost instantly, although the distance between them can be hundreds or thousands of kilometers. It's all about modern communication networks. Selectel has direct connections to ten of the world's most important traffic exchange points: in London, Frankfurt, Moscow and other megacities. This allows you to receive information from anywhere in the world with minimal delays. In the Tsvetochnaya-2 data center, where the report was filmed, 1,090 km of optical fiber alone was laid!

Security is one of the main concepts in hosting. A fire alarm system connected to the central control panel is installed in the server and other rooms of the data center. And on each floor there are gas fire extinguishing stations. In white cylinders — hladon gas. If the automation detects smoke somewhere, gas will be supplied there immediately. By mixing with oxygen, the refrigerant prevents gorenje. At the same time, it is safe for people.

Servers require a lot of electricity to work. And it should be served without interruption. When the current supply from the city network is stopped, diesel generator sets (DGS) are automatically started. While these huge machines enter the operating mode (it takes about 10 minutes), the servers receive energy from batteries and uninterruptible power supplies. Once turned on, diesel generators are able to ensure the operation of the data center for as long as it takes.

The Tirex dinosaur has become an informal symbol of the company. He was born four years ago as a joke, but since then he has firmly entered the life of Selectel. There is a tradition among employees to take a toy dinosaur with them on vacation. So he was able to visit several dozen countries already. Perhaps someday an exhibition with photographs of Tirex from various exotic places will open in Selectel.

Employee training is an important aspect of the company's work. Selectel students learn not only from each other. The company's employees participate in key conferences around the world, and in order to understand foreign speakers, they improve their English for free in classes with native speakers.

The office is equipped with a recreation area, because you need to maintain a balance between productive activities and leisure, especially when work requires serious concentration. For lovers of activities there is a simulator, a ping pong table and a kicker (table football). For the rest, there are anti—stress coloring pages, soft sofas where you can read books from your own electronic library, game consoles, etc. If you don't have enough leisure time at work, there are open vacancies in Selectel. Maybe this is the chance?

Data centers are becoming one of the most important consumers of electricity in the world. Of course, this affects the environment. Selectel solves the problem due to the freecooling technology, when the server rooms are cooled by outdoor air. Fortunately, the climate in St. Petersburg allows you to do this most of the year. It's nice that in everyday office life, the provider's employees take a responsible approach to environmental issues. For example, there is an environmental campaign in the office to collect batteries for their further disposal.