Web site hosting
Web Technik provide web site hosting. This is intended primarily for clients for whom we have designed web sites. These servers are dedicated solely to Web Technik. They are housed in secure data centers with back-up power supplies and connected to the internet backbone by multiple high capacity links. Part of the service is to keep the systems up to date with the latest security patches. On site technical support is available 24x365 and server availability has been better than 99.9%.
We are able to confirm the standard of service - at 10pm on Christmas Day 2009 one of our servers experienced a catastrophic failure, technical support restored service on a new server within a couple of hours.
We can host web sites developed elsewhere but don't actively market this. We prefer to host sites we build on our server largely for technical reasons - we know and understand that environment. Other servers will have different technical attributes and these sometimes constrain our ability to deliver some desirable functionality. Also they use different control panels so we have to learn a new system when setting up the site, that means we have to charge for our learning time.
Let me give an example: We followed up on a web site one of our customers had chosen to move to alternative hosting. The server was shared with over 400 other web sites. That's far too many and will affect the speed of the web site. The server was not in UK, that means response times are lower. Looking at the other sites hosted on the same server we find the sex industry is represented. You may be broad minded and be unconcerned, however there is a risk that the entire server will feature in black-lists. Company firewalls subscribed to those lists will block access to your web site. Also, depending on the nature of the content of those sites, they may attract high traffic volumes further slowing the server and hence the speed at which your website responds. Finally, there is a strong correlation between sex oriented web sites and other questionable activities such as origination of junk mail. That further adds to the risk of blacklisting.
We found that one of our web site rescue customers had a website hosted on an old PC under the desk in his designer's office and connected on a domestic broadband line. That had been slow and unreliable - but then the website went off line completely, the designer couldn't be contacted, they were losing business...
What about security?
It would be foolish and dishonest to claim to be proof against website hacking, defacing, infection with viruses, trojans etc in a world where even the UK Ministry of Defence has experience hacking problems. We believe that having servers dedicated to ourselves, not permitting access to them by anyone but ourselves other than from a web browser and taking tight control over programs and database software on the server reduces the risk.
What does it cost?
As with so many things in life, you get what you pay for. Individual needs differ and so must charges. A popular web site needs more powerful hosting - high bandwidth, powerful computer. An highly interactive web site will need enhanced backup facilities. A website with large volumes of data - maybe a large collection of video files, will need extra disk capacity. And then there are technical features - support for a range of programming languages, databases.
We recently needed to look at a web site for someone and found that the server was hosting a phenominal 5600 websites, we limit our servers to about 100. It does explain why the hosting company was only charging one tenth of our rates - as the costs of running their server will be the same as ours so they are making a much bigger profit while delivering a vastly inferior service.
We have been asked about using the "free" web hosting provided with some Broadband services. That is an unacceptable risk for a commercial web site. It is likely to be slow, unreliable and lacking important technical features. Our advice is to use it for something relatively unimportant - maybe as a backup repository for your photo album.