4L Communications Ltd

Managed Services

With over 10 years of ISP and ASP experience, 4L Communications are well aware of the difficulties encountered trying to run a successful service. Technical, commercial and skills limitations can hinder the development of a robust, reliable system. Conversely, running such a system can place a heavy load on available resoures.

4L offer a range of managed services to help ISPs, ASPs and Enterprise customers improve the reliability and robustness of their existing systems by out-sourcing key components or adding new features. Our managed services focus on 'added extra' functionality - features that a successful online service needs, but which may be impractical in terms currently available resources.

Our managed services include:

System Monitoring

• Real time system state information enables you to see how your service is performing.
• Fault Notification via email, text or voice message allows you to react quickly to restore service.
• Long-term system statistics provides key data to assist in capacity planning, troubleshooting problems and identifying bottlenecks. This information forms the foundation of our usage-based billing service.
• Logfile Analysis provides insight into how your service is being used - highlighting usage patterns, identifying possible abuse and pin-pointing key trends and targets.

System Availability

• Off-site DNS - we can provide off-site name servers for your domains, ensuring that a localised fault doesn't temporarily wipe the domains of you and your customers off the Internet.
• Mail Relaying - we provide an off-site mail relay to provide a "Secondary MX" service - in the event that your primary mail servers become unavailable our servers will accept and hold your mail until your servers recover. This service is works best in conjunction with our Mail Filtering service.

Extra Functionality

• Usage based billing - We can gather and analyse the information you need to bill customers based on actual usage rather than at a flat rate. Careful monitoring and recording of key data allows time/volume/message based billing for services such as Dialup, DSL, Web hosting and Email.
• Mail Filtering - Spam and Virus filtering can reduce the load on your mail servers and transit links, as well as reduce the amount of un-wanted email in your mailbox. We offer a range of filtering solutions that can be applied on a global, per-domain or even per-user basis.

Core Services

• 4L also offer a bespoke solution for core services. We can deliver a robust, highly-available alternative to providing key services such as Email (SMTP/POP/IMAP), Webmail, DNS, or RADIUS authentication on in-house systems.

For further information about our Managed Services, please contact us.