From provisioning and configuration through backup and monitoring - all our servers come fully managed.
Managed firewalls, brute force attack blocking, automatic software updates, secure remote access via encrypted VPN, encryption at rest, OS hardening and passive malware detection system.
Redundant power supplies, RAID storage, daily backup and dual network uplinks as standard.
Scale up with more cores, RAM and storage.
Scale out with our load balanced cluster solutions.
We combine modern high clock speed Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC CPUs, SSD-RAID storage and 10Gbps Ethernet with performance tuning of Apache httpd, PHP-FPM/Tomcat/NodeJS, MySQL, memcached/redis resulting in blazing fast performance for your sites and apps.
While our servers are fully managed, we also know it's important for you to have full control over your servers when necessary. You get full root access via SSH and the Webmin web based control panel.
As we own and operate our own hardware, we can provide any combination of CPU, RAM and storage that you might require.
We have used geography to our advantage. By distributing our customer support team over the UK, Europe and New Zealand we can take advantage of time zone differences to allow us all a good night's rest while staff in other parts of the world hold the reigns. Not only that, we inadvertently pandemic-proofed ourselves in the process.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that equipment fails and software crashes from time to time. One of our favourite things to do, prior to go-live with any new deployment, is to physically pull the plug out of a network switch or server and watch as everything just keeps ticking over. It's a very satisfying feeling to know that every component is fully redundant, and your site will not go down just because one piece of equipment fails or one server crashes.
In order to satisfy ourselves and you that our backup systems really work, we conduct quarterly reviews to ensure backup systems are functioning properly and that backup data is consistent and recoverable.
If you have an off-site mirror, we'll also perform a Disaster Recovery simulation and document the results, so we know exactly how long it will take to fail over and that we are aware of any potential issues that might arise in a real world disaster recovery situation, saving valuable time and energy when tensions are at their highest.
All our datacenter locations are in colocation facilities that meet or exceed our minimum datacenter selection criteria. This lays out our minimum security, environmental, power and network infrastructure requirements, which are far from minimal. So no matter which locations you choose to deploy your servers you can rest assured that the service is backed by best in class infrastructure run by world leading colocation service providers such as Equinix and Digital Realty Trust.
Our Nagios monitoring system constantly monitors thousands of performance metrics, diligently graphing data and ensuring responses are within acceptable bounds. As soon as a page slows down or a server stops responding our incident response team is alerted and jumps to action.
More often than not, the root cause of an outage boils down to an unexpected side effect of a change to a system. Of course it is not feasible to simply never make any changes, so when changes do need to be made, we take the time and care to write up a detailed change plan. Then we have a peer review process to get another set of eyes on it before the action can begin.
Change plans demonstrably help minimise problems by ensuring everyone knows who is involved, what needs to be done, how to test the changes and how to roll back if it all goes wrong.
While not every change is significant enough to warrant a full blown change plan, even minor changes get logged and distributed to our entire team so everyone is in the loop at all times.
Our journey towards ISO 27001 accreditation taught us many valuable lessons, one of which is the concept of Continuous Improvement. By regularly analysing our incident logs, change plans, objectives and review meeting minutes we are able to identify areas of weakness and come up with a corrective action plan. No matter how good we are, there is always room for improvement.
