Wind River Digital In 2018: How Would Wind River Digital Clients Review Them?

Wind River Digital Networks Hosting

Wind River Digital Networks is wholly owned as a division of Nivindel, LLC. Wind River Digital Network originated in 1994 in Wilmington, Delaware, and expanded to become one of the largest providers in the Philadelphia area. Wind River Digital Network originally was a small sub-set of services from Magpage Internet Services. 

Magpage was a full-service internet company, functioning as an early high-speed internet service provider. Magpage grew to specialize in high-end managed colocation services for Fortune 500 companies, but eventually decided to sell the company

. When Magpage sold, Wind River Digital Network was transferred to Nivindel, LLC (based in Montana by same owners of Magpage) to continue hosting services, rather than competing in the internet access delivery industry.

Services & Specializations

Wind River Digital Networks has all of the staple services of a web hosting provider, but with experience going back to the early days of consumer internet. Their primary services can be summed up as:

• Domain Purchasing – look up a domain to find availability, and make a purchase. Different TLDs have different costs, bulk domain search and bulk transfer are available.
• Web Hosting – with three tiers of service, Standard, Advanced and Professional, all of the standard hosting options are available. More information below.
• Virtual Private Servers – (VPS) a flexible virtual machine with all the power of a dedicated server at a fraction of the cost. Four tiers of service are available.
• Dedicated Servers – managed dedicated servers by Wind Digital Networks have a 2 hour hardware replacement server license agreement (SLA) with a 99.99% network uptime guarantee. Configurations are completely custom but purchased on a quoted option.

The three tiers of linux web site hosting plans provided come with 10 GB storage on the standard plan, 50 GB on Advanced and Unlimited for the Professional plan. This comes with 99.9% uptime guarantee, email accounts, webmail and anti-spam. On top of this, Domain Name Services are provided, as well as Network support, Control panel and install scripts. 

Virtual private servers are offered at four tiers, the Basic account which has 512 MB guarenteed RAM and 2 GB burstable. The standard plane has twice the dedicated RAM and storage, the advanced plan has more resources and up to 5000 GB in bandwidth, and the Professional class has the most computing resource available. 

All services can be purchased monthly, quarterly, or annually, with longer term agreements providing a larger discount. For dedicated linux hosting,  SSH access, Curl, Cron Jobs are all available, and websites can either run PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, or Microsoft FrontPage Extensions. This also comes with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and PHP based admin tools for database control.

Infrastructure / Datacenters / Network

Originating from a background in cohosting for Fortune 500 companies, Wind River Digital Networks has outstanding network and infrastructure features.

• UPS Battery Backup Power – providing uninterrupted power to all servers even in rare case of a power outage.
• Diesel Generator Backup Power – if the datacenter loses power, the battery backup keeps the servers running long enough to start the Diesel generators.
• OC-192 Internet Backbone Connection – rooted deep in the backbone of the US network system, the Optical Carrier 192 standard means  the strongest commercially available speeds.
• 24/7 Monitoring – around the clock watch of all servers means that performance of every machine is held to the strictest standards. This includes physical monitoring and tight facility security.
• Cisco / Juniper Network Hardware – with the best networking hardware components on the market, and a history of upgrades, Wind River Digital Networks has amazing delivery speeds.
• RAID-5 Data Storage – using clustered hard drives in a RIAD-5 configuration, data redundancy is maintained such that it would be nearly impossible to have a total data loss.

The data centers themselves are distributed worldwide, at twelve dedicated locations and many more affiliates.

Domestically this includes California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New York, Texas and Washington DC.

Overseas includes Hong Kong, Singapore, London and Sydney. Internet connectivity is maintained by using dozens of internet service providers simultaneously, with the maximum commercial bandwidth available.

Support and Customer Service

Wind River Digital Networks has a strong customer support, with a trouble ticket submission platform and 24/7  live chat or phone availability. All of their support staff are based in America, and the company policy is to have a strong emphasis on customer care quality. A 30 day money back guarantee is provided.

Security & Backups & Server Monitoring

The security of the physical servers is overwhelming and comprehensive. Battery power and diesel generators provide energy security, while environmental control and fire suppression systems keep the data centers safe. 

The locations are reinforced for earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Personnel security involves video surveillance with 30-day retention, biometric access control, motion and entry detection, and compartmentalized physical access. Server network monitoring is 24/7 and part of the server license agreement.

Uptime Guarantee

With strong control over their world class data centers, Wind River Digital Networks is able to provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and in the event of any downtime at all, a 2 hour window to resolve the problem is part of the SLA.

Billing & Payment Policies

Billing can be pre-purchased in order to secure a future cost savings. All hosting options, either Linux website hosting, or VPS servers, have a different pricing schema. The two-year monthly prices are generally less than half the price of paying on a month to month basis. For example, the standard plan linux hosting offers one month of hosting for set amount, but if 24 months are purchased at once, it only costs about a third of the rate if billed monthly.

Summary & Conclusion

Wind River Digital Networks provides decades of expertise into many different full-service products. Having 12 different datacenters all connected through the Optical Carrier 192, means that content delivery will be fast and effective for most website needs, generally without needing to rely on an external dedicated content delivery network (CDN). 

Wind River Digital Networks is also very direct and transparent with their pricing. With a dedicated domestic support staff, they are ready and able to guide the launch of any new site, or migration from another provider to their service.