AT&T Guarantees 30-Minute Server Delivery

AT&T Corp. has been watching one too many pizza commercials as evidenced by its new campaign to offer businesses a dedicated server in 30 minutes or less.

Although you don't get your next one free if its late, AT&T was confident enough to make the promise as part of its Business Ready Dedicated Hosting Service announced Tuesday.

Joe Rabito, the service director, said his company is confident, but not guaranteeing, it can deliver on that promise.

"We're confident enough to offer a pre-configured server in 30 minutes from the time the order is accepted to set up," Rabito said. "Provided, of course, the webmaster gives us the temporary domain name server name to use."

The service is offered any time of the day, seven days a week. Officials are also quick to point out the servers are brand new, name-brand products, not recycled units coming offline from a server farm. Trials runs of the program have been in effect for several months.

AT&T is trying to fill its data centers with customers as it continues rollout of its 44 worldwide facilities. In April, AT&T entered into an agreement with British Telecommunications and Concert to invest $2 billion constructing data centers in 16 countries. The company plans to have 13 up and running by year's end.

Sandy Brown, AT&T vice president of data and Internet services, said the program gives every small business the opportunity to be up and running immediately, without the standard wait for server construction.

"Our customers are asking for fully-managed turnkey web hosting solutions that give them everything they need to launch their web sites in real time," Brown said. "We're committed to provisioning a ready-to-go web server in our Internet data centers within 30 minutes or less."

The program has been geared towards web site developers and integrators to provide instant server support for its customers, without expending resources to build and maintain a data center.

The service runs customers from $295 to $795 per month. Members who take advantage of the dedicated hosting can opt for different levels of server support, depending on bandwidth allocation, disk size, number of IP addresses and amount of RAM. All levels, however include the following services:

• A Cobalt Networks, Inc. , RaQ web server appliance that controls e-commerce applications, domain name server, e-mail and user and server administration.
• ShopSite, AT&T's e-commerce catalog creation tool. For a fee, members can upgrade to the shopsite manager or shopsite professional. Setup is within 30 minutes.
• CyberCash, a credit card processing service.

Alan Rihm, ASPRE, Inc., president and chief executive officer, said AT&T's service gives his company, which specializes in business-to-business integrator and hosting applications, more to offer to customers.

"As an ASP focused exclusively on delivering end-to-end e-business application development and integration, AT&T's Business Ready Dedicated Hosting Service offers the speed, reliability and flexibility we need to serve our customers," Rihm said. "With AT&T's complete hosting portfolio, I can offer my customers a hosting solution that fits their immediate needs and one that scales as their business grow."