A little insurance: Concentric to offer backup bandwidth plan

Concentric Network Corp. will begin offering Web content providers backup bandwidth for peak traffic times or rapid site expansion beginning this month.

Concentric Peak Protection will target software and media distributors-on servers either hosted by Concentric or simply concerned about traffic congestion at their sites due to new product releases or major Web events, said Martin Levy, Concentric's vice president of Internet and data center technology.

The service is an overlay on Concentric's distributed server environment, a platform that lets Concentric provide local and global load-balancing.

Peak Protection takes the next step, Levy said, by taking advantage of Concentric's national OC-3 (155.5 Mb/s) network and public and private peering arrangements. "We can take load-balancing from the existing servers, whether inside or outside Concentric's existing data centers, and load-balance that into our other data centers," he said.

Initially, the service will be provided via servers in Concentric data centers connected to Internet hubs in Chicago, Washington and Santa Clara, Calif.

The service will sell for $700 a month, plus a $1000 one-time set-up fee. Once signed on, a customer uses a secure Web site to request bandwidth at prices starting at $550 a month. Customers can reserve from 500 kb/s to 10 Mb/s, with the ability to burst to 100 Mb/s.

Peak Protection can also serve as backup bandwidth in case of failure. "We heard from so many customers, content providers specifically, who said they were looking for a secondary provider for redundancy, fail-over, and other ways to manage their Web site successfully because of performance problems within their existing environment," said Karen Faleskie, product line manager. "They want to be less dependent on a single provider and have more control over their own bandwidth."

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