For any business, a website is now the most important marketing tool in their arsenal. If you sell online its even more important. It's the hub of all of your business activity, the source of all your sales. Without it, your business will cannot even be able to operate.

Many business owners spend a lot of time searching the internet looking for an agency they can work with to create a website for their company. Hours are spent viewing examples of design work and getting quotes. But hardly any questions are asked about one of the most important aspects of running the website. The hosting solution.

Lots of firms will 'throw in' website hosting as part of an overall design package. It's almost as if the hosting solution is some kind of free 'bolt on' thingy. Something that doesn't really deserve any attention. A sales pitch offering 'free hosting' can be quite attractive for a buyer because they think they are getting bargain. What really happens in this situation is that the important subject of website hosting gets moved to the background. It's forgotten whilst the focus of the buyer get shifted to other seemingly more exciting parts of the project.

The only way for any company to provide cheap or inclusive web hosting is to compromise on the quality of the service. It's a simple formula. Reduce the costs by using cheaper components to build the server. Then cram as many websites on the machine as it will allow. This means the server is overloaded. Web pages load slowly and they fail Google’s speed test. When this happens impatient visitors (which we all are) just leave straight away and seek out a competitor.

Further cost reductions are made by using cheap ISPs that are usually outside the UK. These companies provide basic levels of support. When something goes wrong, you can forget it. Geographical location of a web server is important. Google says that for better rankings, your website should be hosted on server in the same country as your customers. If your webserver is located in Germany or the USA, you'd be better off trying to sell sauerkraut or baseballs. Your website might just rank in those countries.

Search engines have begun take website performance into consideration. Google now including server response time as one of its major ranking factors. This creates a no win situation for you if you are using a bargain basement hosting solution. You end up in a position where Google simply won't send anyone to your website. Those that do arrive by chance will leave rather quickly when your pages take too long to load.

Are you really serious about marketing your business with the help of a website? Then you will need to make sure that you've got a high quality hosting solution.
Your website has to perform well all of the time. Especially during periods of high traffic. This is when the number of visitors to your website (and the other sites on your server) are at their peak.

We have partnered with the multi award winning ISP, UKFAST.
Our servers are high spec with low contention ratios and they are all based in the UK.
Over the past 18 years we have used a number of different web hosts. You might say that we have just about tried them all. UKFAST are simply the best by a million miles.

The level of expertise provided by the UKFAST support team never ceases to amaze us. The speed in which they respond to any issues effecting our servers always exceeds our expectations. They are proactive and can even warn us about issues before they can become a problem. Our servers are housed in UKFAST's own data centres near Manchester.

All our machines are monitored 24hours a day to ensure they are operating as efficiently as possible. If a problem arises, our own engineers are immediately notified by SMS. They usually respond within a few minutes.

All our servers are built to high specifications from the best quality components and contain multiple mirrored hard drives. These mirrored drives are designed to provide redundancy by helping to keep our customers websites online in the event of a hardware failure. Our servers are backed up every day and the data is stored on separate back up servers. The daily backup service runs during the small hours of the morning so that is does not impact the performance of our client's websites.

By continually testing and monitoring, we are able to balance the loads on our servers to ensure that all of our client's websites continue to run quickly and efficiently. We also endeavour to operate our servers at less than 50% of their actual capacity. This way we are able to cater for any spikes in usage without loss of performance.