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 either 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 powered by Rackspace,  considered by some to be THE best hosting provider in the UK if not Europe. They have such customers as ITV.com – Samsung – Vodafone – NHS Direct – The Army and many more high profile customers. Whilst we are not 'quite' as big as these companies, we do enjoy the same technical infrastructure and support from Rackspace as they do and pass this onto our customers at a fraction of the cost of owning your own dedicated server.

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 Rackspace 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 Rackspace servers and was done at considerable extra cost to us.
• Raid array on disks providing for disk redundancy in the event of failures
• Key service port monitoring via Rackwatch Platinum – see separate PDF document for details on this key aspect of our hosting service. This service is vital in keeping our customers websites available with minimum unplanned downtime. In a nutshell, if a key service fails, Rackspace technicians are alerted within minutes of any failure and will probably be working on the resolution before we or our customers have realised there is a problem.
• Managed backup on a 2 week retention period.
• The ability to run your own backup through a DirectAdmin powered hosting control panel (see my earlier email on the subject)
  

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/Zencart related issues 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

Feature	Business	Business Pro	eCom	eCom Pro
Hard Disk Space (mb)	100	250	500	1000
Bandwidth (mb)	512	1024	3072	6144
Business email accounts *	10	20	unlimited	unlimited
eMail forwarders	10	20	unlimited	unlimited
Webmail **
Hosting control panel
Anti Virus on inbound email
Spamassasin protection
Cost	£240pa / £20pm	£360pa / £30pm	£480pa / £40pm	£960pa / £80pm

 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

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.