Our Infrastructure - Technical Overview

We always expect a problem, even though we rarely experience them, and build expecting multiple simultaneous failures!

What we mean by "Infrastructure":

When we talk about Infrastructure, we mean the Mail Servers, Networks, Connectivity, DNS Servers, Backup Systems as well as phone lines, physical provisions, power, and other aspects that are common to how we provide services at a technical level to you.

Core Principles for our Infrastructure

The Core Principles on which we base our Infrastructure are simple. Use equipment which is easily replaceable in the event of failure, always expect everything and anything to fail - and then plan for that problem to actually happen. Always avoid making infrastructure geographically dependent. Where feasible, make infrastructure genuinely redundant against any type of failure.

Types of Equipment

While we don't discuss publicly in detail the equipment we use in our infrastructure, we do work with leading vendors for much of our core infrastructure, and we also review that of our core suppliers to ensure compatibility and knowledge is available. It is also policy to use equipment in a consistent manner across our sites and services.

The equipment we use includes Layer 2,3 and 4 capable network switching, Hardware Firewall's with SPI, Intrusion prevention and malware detection and monitoring capabilities. Our servers are typically built in-house using trusted components affording us more reliable, lower powered systems than those from traditional vendors. Next we build more of them, so we've built in redundancy. To finish, we adhere to our golden rule - and have spares for the whole setup.

How We Do It

Some companies will tell you that good infrastructure needs so called "Tier 1" providers, hugely expensive load balancers, and so on. While they have a place, and can help in the right circumstances, our experience shows that in the majority of cases the very systems designed to protect against these failures are the cause of problems to begin with. It's no surprise as they need careful configuration and management, and, often are too expensive for people to build in a resilient way - threatening all the other efforts they make. To ensure we don't suffer those issues, we had a challenge on our hands. How do you build infrastructure that does not have those classic failure conditions without compromising the performance and reliability our customers depend on.

We believe we achieve this in a unique way, though our policy of being vendor, geography and service neutral, combined with having a measured approach to changes within our core services.

Why We Do It

The reason we do it is simple. Infrastructure is important to every aspect of the services we provide. Therefore our investment and infrastructure not only serves our customers, but serves our own business too. Since we expect high standards for our services, our customers get that same standard by default. Accordingly, we have a direct interest in providing reliable services - after all, if our infrastructure doesn't work, nor does our business!

Finally, our dedicated team know that it is possible to provide highly reliable service when compared to our major competitors in the industry, so every day we prove that small businesses can enjoy the same great service as large companies through our Infrastructure.

What Technologies do we understand?

We work with a large number of systems and technologies. To give you a flavour of our capabilities, products we work with include Terminal Server/Citrix, HP Procurve and Cisco Switching, QoS, VLAN technologies, most Microsoft Server Products such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint. For security, we have expertise in equipment and software from vendors such as Juniper, Fortigate, Cisco PIX, WatchGuard, Sonicwall, and Microsoft ISA. Virtualisation is key to our infrastructure to, so Virtual PC/Server, VMWare, Xen, and Parallels products are commonplace.

The list isn't comprehensive, but will suggest examples of our range of capabilities.

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