We use Microsoft's Azure for our web hosting service. Azure is a new cloud-based operating system. The servers which are running applications for Azure can be found in multiple locations across the United States. One location is the Microsoft data center in Chicago. The data center is probably the largest in the world. The ground floor alone houses several shipping containers, each holding 1,800 to 2,500 servers.

A benefit of using Azure for web hosting is that it provides redundancy of data. Windows Azure general manager Doug Hauger says, "We write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail." This redundancy results in 99.95% uptime.

Our competitors typically offer single server or shared web hosting solutions that may or may not be backed up. Our use of Azure to host websites on multiple servers is superior. In addition to the uptime mentioned above, the speed with which the websites load in the browser is greater because of the available computing power and bandwidth. Furthermore the backups are reliable in contrast to systems that have a single point of failure.

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