ADSL2+ as an Enabling Technology
RunningSites is a 'micro-host', by which is meant that there is no central computing resource, only devolved and geographically separate mini-centres. Micro-hosting is made possible by the arrival of affordable, professional-grade ADSL services, particularly of the ADSL2+ variety. ADSL2+ offers best bit rates of around 24 Megabit per second down, and slightly more than 2 Megabit per second up.
In the vast majority of cases, the uplink runs nowhere near the full 2Mb/s capability when in normal use. RunningSites has selected partner professionals who are located physically close to an exchange, and therefore have full 2Mb/s uplink speed combined with high reliability, and installed servers at these partners' premises. It is the spare capacity on their uplink that is used to host our services.
The cost-effectiveness of fully utilising the ADSL uplink capability from a number of diverse locations was in fact not the main motivator for this approach; the founders of RunningSites had long sought to establish a distributed hosting service with no single point of failure, and that was resilient to the faults that would take a centralised provider 'off the air'. Only with the arrival of ADSL2+ and its variants and successor techologies is this possible.