Hosting

Unlike many hosting companies (especially the cheap hosting providers in Ireland and elsewhere) we are also developers. Our hosting division grew out of our need for fast secure reliable hosting for the web sites we have designed and developed. We would like to think that this gives us a good understanding of what constitutes 'good' web hosting.

Also, it means we are a little conservative in what we offer - we do not oversell our shared hosting or overload our servers (our own development clients are simply too important to us).

Web hosting comes in many flavours. Starting with the cheapest hosting option (sufficient for most needs) and heading up through the range of costs, the main types of Internet hosting are as follows:

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting means your web site lives on a server with many other sites. It is the cheapest option and suits most sites. Good shared web hosting means a combination or relieable shared hosting servers and not too many web sites on each server.

If your site is not particularly busy (most are not) and is there to support your business rather than be your business shared hosting (as long as the provider is reliable and the environment reasonably secure) is probably the best choice.

There are some security concerns: think of it as living in a large block of appartments where the only really secure lock is on the front door of the building - not on your own front door.

Also, depending on the server and how many clients are sharing it, there can be performance issues as you are sharing resources. There is a real cost to hosting, managing and supporting a server - the cheaper the package the poorer each of these is likely to be.

VPS / VDS

Virtual Private Servers and their slightly superior cousins Virtual Dedicated Servers are the next step up. They are a little more expensive both to host and to maintain. They provide distinct security advantages over shared hosting as well as (particularly afa VDS servers are concerned) the ability to dedicate resources to a particular web site or web application. If your site is business critical but not massively busy, a VDS may be a good option.

Dedicated Servers

While the tradional home for many mid scale projects, dedicated servers are not required as often as they used to be - simply because hardware has gotten so much faster and more powerfull that what once needed a dedicated server may now only require a VDS.

Nevertheless there are some distinct advantages:

• Your application is physically isolated from all others - your OS is yours, not a guest on an underlying host OS. This means you have 'real' access to all physical resources (network cards, drives, etc).
• You (or perhaps more importantly your investors / shareholders / auditors) have a sence of physical ownership not present when renting a VDS or 'cloud' server.

There are some disadvantages too:

• Cost
• Support: someone needs to keep the box and all its services patched, updated, managed, etc.
• Stuff breaks - hard drives wear out, power supplies sometimes 'cook' and someone has to fix or replace the damanged components.

If you need a server or three we can help source, provision, install configure and manage and we would love you to pay us to do it - but do not go this route unless you really need to.

Cloud Servers & Services

The cloud adds a layer of abstraction to hardware. Essentially individual servers exist in the cloud in independently of the underlying hardware.

There are a number of mature public cloud offerings and we are familiar with most of them. We can create, configure and manage your cloud servers. We can also advise on what you need, what level of redundancy would be appropriate and even who would be the best public cloudprovider for your needs.