Thanks, That Guy
psmith98752, As we've been mentioned I'll post a little more detail about us and my thoughts. Ensure you don't just look at the surface of SLAs and so on - grill any possible supplier as much as possible. Ask how much they'd manage perhaps - if you broke your site, could it be looked at if you had no clue what you'd broken? Would they monitor/debug your site if you asked? We do almost every day; sometimes we might spend more time than we perhaps should on issues but our theory is that we want to help our clients wherever we can. Of course that doesn't mean we can fix every problem, but we'll try and our clients tend to appreciate that.
We're one of the fastest-growing, smaller (<£5m?) yet established (>a few years trading or £1m turnover perhaps), privately-owned UK hosting companies with over 25,000 clients and ~150,000 websites hosted. We're also one of the larger Nominet members and attend meetings where we can!
We host almost everyone and everything from simple websites to high-availability clusters in leading-edge datacentres - Equinix LD5 features 2N + 1 power and is used by Telefonica, financial organisations and many more businesses.
We offer a standard 99.9% SLA because the theory is that it shouldn't be broken - and if it is, we tend to provide a free month. We can customise if required but already many providers' SLAs are worth less, for example Rackspace's standard (as far as I can tell)
SLA:
So after 30 minutes, on a £2k/month contract, you'd receive £100. I'm also not sure why it doesn't include the server PSU - presumably that's covered elsewhere but I'd expect every Rackspace server to use redundant PSUs...
A portion of our higher-end business comes from those disaffected by the more established/well-known 'high end' hosts. Often it's at renewal time when sales can't talk to technical...we don't have that issue as we all do both!
Our ethos is that we should take care of our clients' requirements as much as possible which is why we can build and manage almost any configuration and are always on hand - be it a shared hosting client who's broken their new website, or a global organisation with a system failure.
We also host many UKBF members with all types of configurations - a popular, lower cost solution for high availability is to use two or more virtual machines. Two fully dedicated servers would start at £500/month +VAT (quad core, 16Gb RAM, dual power supply, your choice of OS - Linux/Windows/Solaris are most popular.)
Please feel free to
contact us if you'd like a chat/quote. We're realistic and can design solutions to meet a range of budgets.
