Many companies, even those where web surveying is their only business, do not want to bear the expense and hassle of hosting the web surveys in-house. In the early days, clients were comfortable with solutions based on a single web server with a single IP line. Soon, they and the research industry learned that, since the Internet is a 24-hour per day medium and volumes cannot be controlled, as is the case in a call center, a more robust systems environment is essential. This is costly –- multiple servers are needed for fault tolerance and load balancing, thus giving reliability and scalability in order to provide for increases in demand. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), perhaps for many hours, is necessary, as is multi-path IP high-speed lines (for when the fiber cable is dug up in error by the water company!). As well, the system needs full data security and 24 hour per day, 7 days per week skilled IT resources. Many market research firms do not believe that this is the business they should be in!

RONIN Corporation provides a web hosting service through a load balanced, fault tolerant, high security server farm. This service is available for a set monthly fee, depending on volumes flowing through the system. The client Market Research firm programs the questionnaire and downloads it to a secure part of the server farm FTP site. Data collected is stored on the FTP site and is available at any time to the client who can upload it to his or her own IT system.

The configuration of the system is:

• Windows NT/2000 Advanced Server data center.
• 4 Dell PowerEdge multi processor (load balanced, RAID).
• Cisco router.
• UNIX firewall.
• Redundant, multi-path BGP dedicated circuits with 7/24 up-time.
• Fully UPS protected data center.
• Data is secured on separate data server.
• 7/24 up-time monitoring from multiple locations.

Current capacity allows over 80,000 interviews per day. As capacity approaches these limits, our architecture allows us to add additional servers without disruption.