Web design Dorset - Website designers Dorset - Silicondesigns

Overview

Hosting and support for any organisation who take their online presence seriously is vital if you are to ensure a continued and uninterrupted website presence. This is one aspect of website ownership that is often overlooked or underestimated but it is our opinion that this is as important as a well structured website and design.

SiliconDESIGNS operates its own dedicated server which is managed Webfusion,  considered by some to be one of the best hosting providers in the UK if not Europe.

SiliconDESIGNS only hosts its own customers and does not offer any non development customer hosting solutions which allows us to keep a tight control over what gets uploaded to our server. Please don’t compare our server solution to one of the thousands of cheap web space providers out there as they are targeting different markets. Please note the following additional benefits of using a dedicated server over a cheap shared hosting plan.

1. The dedicated server environment is shared by a much smaller number of customers meaning faster response times for website visitors. In addition, each hosting account is known individually to us thus ensuring only correctly coded and secure applications are used.
2. The server has been hardened providing a much greater level of security for website customers.
3. Proven to be much better for SEO – our server is located in the UK which is also better for this key aspect of website ownership.
4. We manage the dedicated server on behalf of our customers giving you most of the benefits of dedicated server ownership but without the high cost and resource overheads.

Key points of our service are:

• Our server is housed in a state of the art data centre in London and not in a garage or in a local office. See section 4.1 Data Centre for more details on this key aspect.
• We have a 100% network uptime guarantee with them (not server or website specific but infrastructure)
• A 1 hour hardware replacement guarantee for our server
• 24/7, 365 days a year support (we provide a sub-set of this to you though but it is at our disposal if we choose to use it)
• SAS 70 security auditing providing high security on all Webfusion premises
• 4.1.1 Security section in the attached document covers security in more detail but includes both physical and logical
• High quality and fast dedicated Linux server – shared by circa 300 customers (compare this to >30,000 on cheap shared hosted space and you will be able to see the obvious performance benefits)
• Our server has gone through and additional server hardening process to further enhance the base level software layer which is Red Hat Linux (makes the server more secure than other non-hardened servers) This is not standard for most dedicated servers and was done at considerable extra cost to provide additional security.
  
• Raid array on disks providing for disk redundancy in the event of failures
• Sservice port monitoring .This service is vital in keeping our customers websites available with minimum unplanned downtime. In a nutshell, if a key service fails, support technicians are alerted within minutes of any failure and will probably be working on the resolution before we or our customers realise there is a problem.
• Managed backup on a 2 week retention period.
• The ability to run your own backup through a Plesk powered hosting control panel.
  

We provide a hosting AND support solution to our customers and not just a hosting solution. The support part of the equation gives you the ability to ask for help with any Joomla related issue and of course any website related problems and will give you access to our new (but yet to be launched) Joomla tutorial site and website owner newsletter service.

 

pricing

The table below is a subset of the full range of hosting plans we provide. Please contact us if you requirements fall outside of this example plans.

Feature	Silicon200	Silicon300	Silicon600	Silicon1000	Silicon5000
Hard Disk Space (mb)	300	600	1200	2000	5000
Bandwidth (mb)	1500	3000	6000	10,000	50,000
Business email accounts *	10	10	20	unlimited	unlimited
eMail forwarders	10	10	20	unlimited	unlimited
Webmail **
Hosting control panel
Spamassasin protection
Hacking Protection (using a Firewall)
Support requests	> 12 PA	>18 PA	>24 PA	Unlimited	Unlimited
Application  updates ****
Cost***	£240pa £21pm	£330pa  £31.50pm	£660pa £330sa £60pm	£1045pa  £522.50sa  £95pm	£2750pa £1375sa £250pm

 Note: All hosting plans are annual subscriptions with the option to pay monthly.

* For a definition of our business email service, please click here

** Using a 3rd party webmail provider such as GMX, Google or Yahoo

*** Monthly charge assumes monthly standing order. PayPal subscriptions can be setup at an additional charge of 3.5% per transaction.

**** Only applicable to the Joomla core system.

What Is Hosting?

A good analogy of hosting is the local shop in your area. For this business to trade, the owner must have things (products) to sell and also somewhere to sell it from (premises). Now the owner can either buy the land and buildings to operate the business from or they can rent it from a Landlord. The first choice is very expensive but does have long term benefits. The second choice is a much more cost effective way to trade if it's a start up business and the owner is unsure of how successful the business is likely to be. Even if the long term success is assured, renting with all its associated benefits can be a most attractive and logical choice for a lot of businesses.

While web pages (the products) are designed and developed on a single computer, they must be transferred to a server (or host), so that they are available to the rest of the world over the Internet. A host (the premises) is simply a computer that has a constant, high speed connection to the Internet, whose sole purpose is to serve websites to the internet. In other words, website hosting provides the place on the Internet where your Website lives.

To have a Website on the Internet you first need to have a Web server. Unfortunately, owning a Web server can be very costly and requires technical expertise that most businesses don't have or even want to have. This is where Website Hosting come in. Website hosting companies provide the equipment and other technical resources that you need without the headaches that come when you have to do it yourself. SiliconDesigns has its own dedicated server that will only be used by customers of ours. Some cheap shared hosting plans (£free > £5pm) can serve up to as many as 20,000 websites.  The impact of that much traffic on one web server can have quite a dramatic effect on website performance, not to mention all the security issues of sharing a web server with thousands of other companies and individuals you know nothing about.