Business Critical Hosting

Uptime and performance monitoring

We monitor our customers interests externally every minute to ensure websites and servers remain available — that's every single website, application and server monitored individually. If any issues are detected, our engineers are notified instantly and immediately investigate without customers needing to contact us. Even though in the vast majority of cases websites might go down by user-related activities such as installing an incompatible plugin, we still assume responsibility and investigate first. In these cases, we usually fix the issue without charge before our customers have a chance to let us know they made a mistake in the first place!

While we don't rely on their CDN capability, our DNS is powered by CloudFlare which is the fastest and most powerful DNS service in the world and combined with their ability to use extremely low TTL's, we're able to migrate customers websites and applications between servers almost in real-time without any downtime. This has a multitude of benefits - if you're suddenly experiencing viral traffic, we can move your website onto a faster server or provision more servers to load balance traffic. This happens automatically and without downtime. Also, if our servers experience issues or we need to perform updates or maintenance, we opt to move customers to another server while we fix the issue. Again, all to prevent downtime.

Our system will also automatically speed test every customers websites several times a day and again, if issues are detected, an engineer will investigate to see whether the problem is on our end or provide advice and discuss with you possible options and solutions. Once a month, every website is checked manually for performance issues and any anomalies will be relayed to the customer as soon as possible. No other company cares this much.

Security, backups and redundancy

We're one of the few Canadian service providers that are registered for data protection in multiple countries including the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (registration number: ZA246885) so our customers are not only protected by strict Canadian data protection laws, but also far stronger European laws. Our infrastructure is completely PCI DSS and HIPAA compliant which means customers can store payment and health information on our servers. Others charge for this or claim to be compliant without any kind of certification or third party audits.

Proactive security

We have a dedicated team of engineers whose sole task is to find vulnerabilities in our infrastructure, in WordPress, popular plugins, our customers websites and applications. When we find a vulnerability, we let the relevant entities know so they can release updates but since it can often take months before a patch is released by them (often leaving millions of websites vulnerable), we patch our servers and clients websites immediately to minimise risks. And since WordPress updates often break websites, our patches only target what's necessary and ensure websites remain operational after the patch so we can keep your website safe without the anxiety or reluctance of updating WordPress.

We also have a proprietary security system which prevents most forms of brute force attempts. For example, if a customer uploads a plugin that contains malware — we have mechanisms in place that will make it very difficult for someone to use the malicious plugin to take control of a website and/or perform malicious activity because of our authentication system. Every host claims to be secure but none have the technical capability to do what we do, none go to the extremes that we do to protect our clients and none have a proven track record like we do.

Common sense security

It's common now to hear companies experience breaches and data leaks and while it's impossible to be 100% secure, many have occurred through plain old negligence such as not encrypting data, allowing data access remotely for the sake of convenience and so on. They could have been prevented and while nobody can be perfect, everyone can follow common sense and to make matters worse, many of their breaches occurred in the exact same manner as other companies many years earlier yet took no action until it was too late.

As well as constantly searching for vulnerabilities in our infrastructure, we also keep abreast of the news and if we find a company has experienced a breach, we immediately and thoroughly test our systems for the same and similar types of vulnerabilities — and take action where necessary. We don't need to experience a breach to learn their lessons. We would rather be safe than sorry.

Backups and redundancy

Most companies claim to make daily backups which in reality isn't the case or their backup strategy is unreliable and customers aren't aware of this until they need it. When their customers ask to restore from a backup, they often come across failed/unusable backups or backups that do not exist. To mitigate this, we perform full backups of files and databases every 3 hours and store copies of them in so many different locations to ensure a recent copy is always available in the event of a catastrophe.

Backups are stored on the physical server in RAID (multiple disks have the same copy), a copy is stored on our local storage array network (SAN) which is a cluster of servers and disks (again, multiple drives will hold a copy on the SAN) at the other side of the data centre and a final copy is sent to Amazon S3 with geo-redundant replication. To date, we have not lost a backup. No other host can do or offer this without charging thousands of pounds per month for the backups alone.

Support, development and business strategy

We're the only company in the world to have, at every level, qualified engineers that have the knowledge and experience to build complex applications so customers can rest easy knowing when they have an issue, the first person they speak to will have the technical knowledge to resolve it without needing to escalate it. We treat all customer issues like our own.

We also provide a wealth of information beyond just answering questions — if we feel there is vital information you need to know to help guide your website or business, we will provide it. We don't believe any other company goes to the extent we do. There are no incentives to upsell the most or log the most time and we are encouraged to work as quickly as possible without compromising on quality.

Development

Hosting customers receive a significantly discounted hourly rate for all website development-related tasks. Sometimes customers just want minor changes and more often than not, we provide them for free. Our low pricing is in no way a representation of the quality of work received — all businesses, regardless of their monthly spend, receive the same level of diligence and meticulousness. Website development is just a small area of our business and we don't treat it as a revenue stream.

Business strategy

Our primary focus is to improve our service for existing customers rather than gain more customers and therefore reinvest our profits as much as possible. We frequently upgrade hardware and perform software tweaks that can provide small or major improvements on performance and security. In typical circumstances at other hosts, a website would slow down as it grows but websites on our platform continue to hold the same performance or get faster. No other company can offer this.