Managed Servers

We constantly monitor and maintain the servers because prevention is better than cure

When you purchase a server and server management from us, we know how important uptime is for you; it’s that important for us too, so we will drop everything else we are doing if there’s an emergency issue on your server.

And because we know how important uptime is, we constantly monitor and maintain the servers we manage to prevent little problems becoming big ones and to enable us to react rapidly if there’s an issue.

On our managed servers we provide:

• Automated software updates
• Access to a team of trained server management staff
• Our “battle-tested” firewall, anti-virus, anti-malware and security software configuration with real-time alerts and automated responses to developing situations
• Real time uptime monitoring
• Real time “signs of trouble monitoring” – monitoring we’ve developed over the years to warn us about signs of a problem developing
• Our automated information processing and automated response system allows us to really stay on top of managing your server – a well configured cPanel/WHM server generates masses of email alerts – Backups completed, viruses detected, Intrusion attempts detected, undeliverable mails to name just a few and our own “signs of trouble” monitoring does the same – our automated information processing and filtering system works out what needs to be considered by a trained human being and what is likely to need immediate attention – the rest it deals with on it’s own
• Local backups kept on the server - usually 3 copies
• We produce and analyse a weekly server state report

Managed virtual servers give you flexibility

The beauty of using managed virtual servers is that upgrading from one server to the next is easy and costs just £25 for a regular upgrade which requires about 15 minutes of downtime and is normally arranged within 1 business day.

SQL Server Web Edition is £33/month.

There's information at the bottom of this page to help you choose the right server for you. But, please
feel free to contact us for a no obligation consultation. Our experts will be delighted to help you choose.

Optional extras

Solid Disk Drives

As an alternative to standard HDD drives, new solid state drives (SDD) give enhanced performance but are a bit more expensive. For typical web server usage where storage space is rarely the issue but speed is paramount, we recommend solid state drives.

Monthly Vulnerability Scan

We offer and recommend a monthly vulnerability scan and review for £60 per month.

Advanced Port Monitoring

Advanced port monitoring is also available which will check that up to 5 specific services are running (eg. SSH, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, MySQL), and will also monitor server load and disk space usage. Email and SMS alerts can be configured to notify staff of problems. The cost for this service is £35 / month. This is not normally required.

Hardware Firewall

A hardware firewall can be provided for £35 / month. This is not normally required, the software firewall that we provide and configure as part of the server management service is usually more than sufficient.

How do you decide what level of managed server is appropriate for your needs?

An adequate level is that which is able to support the amount of simultaneous users that your website(s) needs to serve – ‘support’ meaning that the server has sufficient resources to process requests and give responses to all users who are making demands at any given moment.

Server resources

For example, a brochure type website that simply advertises a business and expects maybe 10-20 visitors per day during business hours is a classic low traffic website, and you may assume that for the most part the server needs to be able to handle 1 or 2 simultaneous users since the visits will likely be spread over the course of the day. This example is the perfect candidate for shared hosting where individual website resource requirements are low, and hosts may use 1 server for hosting many sites, thus reducing costs for all.

Going up from there, you have dynamic, database driven websites where the demands on the web server are higher, since the server must perform more processing per page request than simply sending a file from the disk to the requesting user. In this case, the server must often access a database, check user permissions, and present pages that are tailored to the specific user. In this case, resource demands (CPU, RAM, disk access) per page request are obviously higher. Then we must also take expected traffic into account – if you are expecting 100 visits per day, usually during business hours, then visits per hour = 100 / 8 = 12.5 visits per hour, or 0.2 visits per minute. If you are expecting 1000 visits per day, then this is 125 visits per hour or 2.08 visits per minute.

The most important factor in assessing the required server resources for your website is therefore the expected simultaneous visits – 1 user requesting a page from your website continuously over the course of the day will not require many resources to serve those requests, 2 simultaneous users will require double, 10 simultaneous users will require 10 times etc etc.

Bandwidth

Following the server resources question, comes bandwidth. The question here is how much bandwidth do you need to keep your website running with your expected levels of traffic. If you are expecting 100 visits per business day, you have an average page size of 100KB, and on average your users access 2.5 pages per visit, then you are expecting to serve 250 pages per day of 100KB each, which is 25000KB or 24.41MB per day. You are only expecting this traffic on business days, so assuming that there are 20 business days in the month, you are expecting 20 * 24.41MB per month which is 488.2MB.

For an existing website or websites, we can analyse the usage statistics to help you decide on the appropriate server, and for new websites we can make an educated guess based on your website and marketing plans.