Co-Location
You buy, own and manage the servers that deliver the IT services your business needs and locate them in our environmentally-controlled, secure server rooms. We are completely independent of any given hardware manufacturer, and equally at home hosting Microsoft, Apple, Sun or Linux environments.
To provide the control and security you require, our facilities include:
- Controlled computer-room access: ingress and egress require the use of an electronic fob and a key of which there are only 6. We thereby ensure that only our staff and authorised customer representatives, escorted at all times, can enter the server rooms in our steel-framed subterranean facility, which is housed in buildings with minimal external indication of their purpose. With no external windows coupled with solid walls, external IR penetration is prevented. Similarly, we shield against electro-magnetic interference through the use of coatings, metal meshes, strips and metallised fabrics.
- Power: we have a substation on-site with direct connections across our own land. We have power filtering and spike suppression to the UL1449 standard, and UPS facilities to provide a minimum of three hour of battery backup. Thereafter power is provided by our generator for as long as required. Generator power is sufficient to power our whole building including HVAC systems. We maintain generator power until there is assurance from the local electricity distributor that a stable supply can once more be maintained.
- Environment monitoring: we have extensive fire detection and alarm installations, not only in server rooms but throughout our buildings. This extends to neighbouring buildings, (since we own those too), and thus would receive early alert of any incident in adjacent properties. We also have digital monitoring of temperature, humidity and air pollution and proactively analyse the logs to detect any gradual changes over time.
- Connectivity: at our primary site, we have dual, diversely-routed IP connections to a Tier 1 network and we peer with BT, Cogent and Exponential-e over divers routes. Packet-shaping capabilities are in place to ensure that even when under an external attack, services are maintained. We connect to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site via dedicated point-to-point fibre which passes through no switching exchanges, and which enters our DR site through private ducting.
- 24/7 support capabilities: Service monitoring software runs on dedicated servers in both of our sites. This includes name servers, switches and routers, as well as customer servers, and alerts are automatically generated in the event of the detection of service unavailability, or of Pings of Death, IP Spoofing, Flood attacks etc. Any period of 5 minutes without a response to probing also results in automatic alerting.
A variant of Co-Location is the provision of Virtual Private Server (VPS) capabilities. This differs from ’standard’ Co-Location in that we own the physical server(s) that deliver the services that you manage, but it will appear to you the user, that you are running your own dedicated server. Via the use of proven virtualisation software products such as VMWare, we are able to offer virtualised hosting of just about any environment
Finally, to us, Co-Location includes having our people in the same building as the equipment. You may have guessed by now - we believe that great hosting is about more than just a building with equipment in it. Over the years, failures in high-profile ISP hosting have demonstrated that the principal cause of failure in the restoration of service has been the lack of co-ordination between management, staff, facilities management providers, and service companies (batteries, power, HVAC etc.) rather than being due to purely technical issues. Our business model of a compact, concentrated, co-located and highly-focussed team mitigates this major risk at a much lower price point than competitors.