Hosting

Users of our software products benefit from a professionally managed hosting environment.

Why Managed?

In the past, many companies managed their own software environments. This is a complex task as it involves buying, setting-up and maintaining complicated hardware and software products.

Many companies are now deciding the use a managed environment to lower the overall cost of managing their data. The advantages are clear: software companies and data centres have the skills and resources to create an environment that is perfect for modern business software.

By offering services to many clients, we are able to offer a standard of service that few internal IT departments could compete with and at a fraction of the cost.

Your Hosting Environment

We buy our server space from our partner Rackspace, one of the world’s largest data centre providers and in our opinion, the best.

Our customers benefit from:

• All of the latest hardware and software required to run our applications
• Our insistence on industry standard managed databases with class-leading security and reliability
• High speed network access with multiple redundant internet connections
• High end servers providing responsive applications
• Top of the range dedicated firewalls protecting your data
• Availability of the system to a target 99.99% availability during office hours.
• All essential maintenance carried out at convenient times (usually overnight at weekends)
• Nightly backups with a backup history maintained for 2 weeks
• Our committment to do any work required to restore the system in the event of problems

Your Data

We understand that keeping your data with us can seem like you have just handed us the keys to your most treasured valuables. That’s why we take special care of it. We:

• Use class leading database software, internationally recognised as the most robust and reliable in the world
• Insist on the latest security patches and virus checking software for our own servers.
• Automatically apply Windows and database updates outside work hours.
• Use top of the range Cisco firewalls dedicated to ensuring your data is safe.
• Use servers dedicated only to running your software.
• Offer an anytime data retrieval service where you can get an up-to-date copy of all of your data
• Make and securely store full backups of your data every night.
• Can usually rescue your data in the event of a catastrophe to within 5 minutes of the problem
• Make and securely store copies of your software application every time they change.
• Never look at your data without your express permission

Our Service Level

We don’t get many faults to fix and so we are in the enviable position of being able to offer fantastic service levels for fault and problem fixing. During UK working hours, we have always started work on faults as soon as we are aware of them. Usually, our integrated bug-fixing tool spots and reports the fault as it happens and often before you see it. In many cases you won’t even have to pick up the telephone. At the very worst, we guarantee to start work within 1 hour of the fault being reported.

Technology Stuff

If you are technically minded you might like to know our applications use the latest version of Oracle’s flagship database accessed via Apache web servers, all hidden behind top of the range Cisco firewalls. The whole infrastructure runs on top of Windows 2003 with redundant disks, power supplies and network connections making sure that servers are reliable. Our code uses PLSQL and Java to generate webpages using (X)HTML, javascript and CSS which can be accessed from any web browser on any device.