We’ve changed our hosting – from VPS to Colocated Dedicated Hardware in a Hampshire based Tier 3 Data Centre

Posted on 27 May 2022

When we started Plexaweb, web hosting was never an intended service we wanted to offer. We just wanted to build websites and focus are efforts on making great websites.

The trouble we found was finding a decent host offering shared hosting (that wasn’t going to cost a fortune) was near on impossible.

How big hosting companies make more profit

Many of our clients don’t know how hosting works or at least didn’t until they had a website built in many cases.

When you’re operating as a host, you’ll have a building and also you’ll pay for at least:

• Staff
• HVAC – Cooling
• Power – Electricity and fuel for generators
• Internet – redundant connections
• Servers (Typically once every 5 years or so)

Each server will have a maximum capacity of websites, so the more websites you can fit on one server = more profit.

The problem is, many companies (particularly larger ones, larger ones with big brands) will oversaturate their servers. So much so, when a few websites experience high traffic, it can bring the whole system to a halt. This means slow websites, bad SEO, bad user experience… not good.

It was time to setup our own hosting… this took us to having our first VPS.

VPS

Operating a datacentre costs thousands each month, a single server can cost hundreds to several hundreds or more but a VPS can just cost several hundred per year.

What is a VPS?

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s a virtual machine with dedicated resources sitting on a physical machine that typically runs several VPS servers. The dedicated resources part is important because it means we can control available resources, leading to better performance and better reliability.

We used a big company for our VPS servers and the support was okay but not as good as we would like.

We soon started offering dedicated VPS’s to our clients that needed it as well as having multiple VPS’s ourselves. The performance of these was okay but there were improvements to be made. We also required better support now.

Why Colocate in Fareham?

Being based in Southampton, Fareham takes around 30 minutes to travel to. This means we can provide onsite support if required. The team are also on hand 24/7 and are a lot more available than the support team we had when we were operating multiple VPS servers.

We now have a 1Gbps connection which is much faster than (around 3x than the VPS servers).

Latency is as minimal as possible for website users in Hampshire and the UK.

Using our own hardware means we know we’re using quality physical servers.

Control Panel change

Being a big brand, the company offering the VPS servers had a great deal with cPanel. Something only large companies appear to be able to achieve. Wanting to offer better performance we have dropped cPanel for Direct Admin.

Since considering different control panel options, we’ve tested the ease of use, reliability and performance. Direct Admin come out on top.

For every website and web application we have ever made, direct admin offers no disadvantages over cPanel.

Bespoke VPS

We’re now offering bespoke VPS servers too. For more details on these, please get in touch.

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