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. - ShopSite, AT&T’s e-commerce catalog creation tool. For a fee, members
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.”
