What's actually underneath your website

Every host says their platform is reliable. Almost none of them tell you what reliable is made of, which is how businesses end up finding out the hard way – on the morning the site is down and nobody can say why.

The difference between a platform that copes and one that falls over is nearly always structural. Is there more than one of everything? Does the platform react to trouble, or does it work to avoid it? Is there a cap on how much of a server you’re allowed to use, and what happens on the day you need more than your share?

Those are answerable questions. Here are our answers.

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it’s where most platforms stop short.

Think of a supermarket. Basic load balancing is a shop that opens a second till only when the first one breaks – the queue eventually moves, but everyone in it has already had a bad few minutes. That’s failover, and it’s what “load balanced” usually means: your site gets moved somewhere else once the server it was on has already died.

Our platform runs a till count that changes with the queue. Global load balancing monitors traffic continuously and distributes it across multiple servers as demand shifts – before anything is struggling, let alone failing. Redundancy is still there underneath, so a hardware failure is handled, but the day-to-day job is keeping your site quick rather than merely alive.

Which means: the improvement shows up on your ordinary Tuesday, not just on the rare morning something goes wrong. Your visitors get a page served from a server that has room for them.

Plenty of hosting puts your website, your database and your email on one machine. It’s cheaper to run, and it’s fine right up until it isn’t.

Think of the electrics in a building. Everything on one circuit means one fault takes out the lot, and one greedy appliance dims every light in the place. Sensible buildings split the load.

Our platform splits it too. Web servers serve pages. Database servers – MySQL and MSSQL – run on their own machines with far more memory than the web tier, so a heavy query never has to fight your homepage for resource. FTP servers handle file access. Mail servers handle email. Each role is its own set of servers, and each set has more than one server in it.

Two things follow from that, and both matter.

A compromise in one place doesn’t hand over the others. If something gets into your website, it hasn’t automatically got your mailboxes as well. That’s containment, and it’s the sort of thing you only value in hindsight.

A busy database doesn’t slow down your email. Or your file transfers, or your checkout. Load in one place stays in that place. Read more about how the platform is protected on our hosting security page.

Good infrastructure is only half of it. The other half is who answers when you ring.

We’re an IT company that hosts websites, so your site sits with the same team that looks after your computers, your email and your network. Nobody spends a week working out whose fault it is.

We’ll also tell you when you don’t need the bigger option. If a standard plan does everything your site asks of it, that’s what we’ll recommend.