We have started a major change and upgrade to our hosting infrastructure. Historically all our hosting has been based on dedicated servers. Although this has served us well and reliably for the last 10 years or so the benefits versus cost of virtual hosting has started to come to a point where, for most of our customers, a virtual platform makes sense.

This process is likely to be phased in over the next few years as our dedicated servers come to their end of life/lease. Customer’s web sites and applications will be migrated across to new servers as part of a gradual process and it is not expected that any customers will see any downtime as a result of this although improvements in performance and latency are expected.

Virtual servers offer a number of benefits but the primary one for our web hosting customers is scaleability. The performance, memory and storage of any of our virtual servers can now be changed either permanently or temporarily to cope with high demand periods such as sales, special offers, advertising campaigns etc… All servers are hosted across multiple hardware platforms, isolating the server from hardware failures.

In the first stages of this process a number of servers have been purchased with different vendors and each is being evaluated for performance and stability.