Our Platform Find out how it works

Our web hosting is provided on a bespoke cloud platform, which ensure your websites receive 99.9% uptime and unrivalled reliability not possible with a regular internet package.

Cloud hosting is an alternative to dedicated server hosting using highly available virtualization technologies. The hardware on which your web hosting runs is virtualised. This brings a number of huge benefits including the ability to offer massive allowances with huge uptimes at a low cost.

The cloud hosting platform alows for full load balancing, off-site backup space, instant SAN disk backups and statefull failover. This would not be possible with traditional web hosting setups.

To sum up, our cloud is made up of multiple Dell servers in two data centres in Manchester. Each server node contains an Intel Xeon 2.4GHz 4 core processor and either 16GB or 32GB RAM. The nodes are connected to 4 1GigE connections from different providers. The cloud is also connected to other datacentres, one of which holds our disaster recovery cloud.

How is it so Reliable?

The cloud uses the latest virtualisation software to abstract your Plesk hosting services from the hardware that it sits on.

The storage is centralised in a highly available Storage Area Network (SAN). This not only makes the network a lot quicker, but also means that you're no longer reliant on the physical machine on which your web hosting runs.

Our Cloud hosting cluster controller watches all Plesk hosting services day and night, and if it detects a failure of any critical hardware, it'll automatically move the hosting onto spare hardware.

You won't notice this, and engineers would then simply replace the failed hardware with no impact to your services.

Most web hosting servers are vastly under-used. In tests across our datacentre we've found that at any given time, about 75% of our hardware is being used less than 25% of its maximum capacity.

That's a big waste of energy and money.

By pooling both backend storage and frontend servers we can cut hardware costs dramatically, and pass that saving on to you. It also makes the whole process energy efficient.

This also means that your web hosting package always has the power you need, providing unrivalled performance gains, you're never going to find your Cloud hosting low on resources

Green Initiative

Overall we believe our hosting uses approximately an eighth of the power of a modern similarly specified physical web hosting server.

Combined with the energy reduction procedures we're putting in place across our datacentres, it adds up to make a real difference.

Flexibility to grow

Our Cloud hosting platform allows for full load balancing, off-site backup space, instant SAN disk backups and statefull failover.

These services would not be possible with traditional web hosting setups.

All Cloud hosting services sit behind our Enterprise class Cisco firewalls for your protection, with our unique Plesk web-based interface to set up your rules.

Resiliance

This diagram shows what happens in the unlikely event of a hardware failure (and it is unlikely as the physical machines have dual power supplies, hot-swap hard drives, and are fed by two independent power feeds from two separate UPS devices in our datacentre).

To see how reliable our datacenter is, please read our datacenter page

If a disk fails in the storage device, again, it's not a problem.

Whilst our technicians are alerted, one of the dedicated hot spare disks automatically drops in place, and keeps things running.

Our technicians will then replace the failed disk.

The same thing goes if a power supply or controller fails in the storage device.

Everything that's critical has at least one hot-standby backup part.

Network

The cloud is located in a fibre-optic metropolitan area network spanning four facilities in Manchester, connecting our two cloud datacentres to the internet.

We are connected to multiple upstream bandwidth providers at three different Manchester datacentres, giving us complete independence from the failure of any bandwidth provider or facility.

This diagram (right) shows our network connectivity between facilities and the upstream providers to which we connect. These upstream providers include: Cogent, Level3, MaNAP and Tiscali.

To test the speed of the network please use the speed test download links below.