Ecommerce web design by Absolute Web Design | www.absolutewebdesign.co.uk

Website Hosting

Absolute Web Design provide high quality web hosting through our DELL leased web
servers based at the GX networks data centres in Leeds and Manchester.

We choose GX networks because the GX Tier1 network is one of the UK’s largest IP
networks. The network is fully redundant ensuring 100% connectivity at all times. We have
a 100% SLA (service level agreement) with GX networks as well hardware replacement
guarantees and 24 hour on site engineers
 
With any ecommerce or business website, it is absolutely vital that the web server hosting
the site is running 24hours a day, if a server goes off line, your website will not be available
and that means you loose sales. We have many customers whose business is completely
web based, some of these businesses have turnovers running into millions of pounds. To
make sure that we provide the highest possible level of service to our customers we run
very high specification servers with built in multi level redundancy.
 
Server specification

All our servers run dual hard drives which means that all data for websites and email is
mirrored and copied to both hard drives via raid controllers. This provides a high level of
redundancy so that if one drive fails the other continues to serve web sites. The failed drive
can be replaced without down time.
 
Data Backup

As a further precaution to ensure safety of website data, all our servers are backed up
daily onto tape backup. These backups are stored securely off site away from the data
centre for security.

Bandwidth

In an attempt to keep hosting prices down, most web hosting providers run servers on
what are called virtual pipes. This means that during busy periods your website can slow
down to a snails pace as they run out of bandwidth. The most annoying thing about this is
the fact that the slow speed may actually be caused by other webservers on the same
network as they gobble up the network resources.

We do not use Virtual pipes. Each of our web servers has its own dedicated pipe
connection meaning that bandwidth is not restricted by other servers on the same network
during busy periods.
 
Load balancing

We constantly monitor server resources and balance loads across different application
pools on all our web servers. Load balancing across application pools means that websites
can share all the server’s resources. This ensures that they continue to run at peak
performance even during busy periods when loads are high.
 
Server monitoring

To give the highest possible uptime, our servers are monitored through several methods.
At the primary level, Pipex data centre engineers monitor the network infrastructure,
connectivity and server availability 24 hours a day. This ensures that any issues can be
attended to immediately if there is a problem.
 
URL content monitoring (second level)

To make absolutely sure that our servers are always running correctly, we monitor test
sites and individual site pages through http get and post requests.

For redundancy, our monitoring service runs from a third party location, completely off the
server network. The monitoring service runs 24 hours a day, polling test site pages every
180 seconds. The service looks for specific text on pages to make sure that all services
are running correctly. In the event of failure ,engineers are notified instantly so that any
problems can be immediately attended to.


Looking for more information...

Contact Absolute Web Design direct with any questions or queries you may have regarding our Hosting packages or any other of our website products on 01226 247576 or 01226 219096.