Why iomart is the natural choice for business hosting

We are proud to stand behind our pledge of delivering 100% business uptime. For all of us at iomart hosting it is more than a marketing slogan, it is at the heart of everything we do.

Business uptime is so much more than network availability and having power to your server. Power to your server is useless if a disc has failed! Business uptime is all about every component of your IT systems operating effectively so that you can conduct your day to day business without worrying about a system failure. It's about all engineering the end to end hosting process without a Single Point of Failure. And you can only engineer and manage this if you own the end the end process - from domain to data centre - from 'soup to nuts'.

We understand that the more cynical amongst you believe that guaranteeing 100% Business uptime is impossible but we believe we have the tools, the facilities, the expertise and the processes in place to ensure that the impossible is possible.

Question: How many hosting companies advertise the fact that 'your equipment will be housed in our secure/resilient/Tier3 /state of the art (delete as appropriate) data centre?'

Answer: All of them - and yet how many of them actually own their 'own' data centre? The practice of hosting equipment in a third party's data centre is perfectly acceptable but the passing it off as 'your own' should raise alarm bells. If a company feels it needs to 'be economical with the truth' in this instance what else isn't it be straight about?

iomart hosting genuinely owns 5 data centres. Since 2007, we've invested millions of pounds in our UK data centres. We offer over 4850m² of highly scalable, fully redundant newly commissioned data centre capacity in London, Nottingham, Glasgow, Maidenhead and Leicester. Each facility is equipped with the latest data centre technologies and is free from legacy operating practices.

So the next time you see a hosting company advertising 'our' data centre - ask them if they genuinely own the bricks and mortar...

Many hosting providers advertise that they have dedicated multiple Gb circuits. Don't fall for it. How many £29 p/m hosting companies can really afford £30K - £80K p/m in network connectivity costs? Simple answer: probably none.

iomart hosting has built a completely fail safe closed network connecting each one of our data centres. Our entire network backbone is composed of high-end routers and switches from Cisco, Juniper, Foundry and F5. Our network is fully switched and redundant to provide for connectivity that is free of collisions and packet loss. All of our hardware has dual power supplies to keep our network up and running in case of equipment failure.

We use multiple tier providers including Geo, Virgin Media, Cogent Communications and Global Crossing.

Yes you can buy cheap web servers - but that is not what iomart hosting is about. We offer managed and complex hosting services for businesses that require high availability, fail safe resilience, flexibility and scalable solutions. We will not risk our client's reputations by using low-end 'servers' to improve our margins by a few pounds. We only use enterprise-grade hardware from Dell and HP.

Many hosting providers who advertise 24 x 7 support are counting on the fact that businesses will only contact them Monday to Friday 9 through 5. And many other providers define 24 x 7 support as an email address with an auto-responder. iomart hosting advertises 24 x 7 support because we have technical and support teams working 24 x 7. Our NOC teams, located in our data centres, are available to take calls, make decisions and act to ensure that you are fully supported every second of the day. The internet never sleeps - so why should we?

iomart has been managing complex hosting environments for over a decade. Founded in 1998 as an ISP, we have experience of a wide range of customer requirements and solutions, from a micro business requiring basic web site hosting to designing and managing high end clustered data base solutions for multi nationals. By owning our own data centres we have become totally accountable to our clients through the sole ownership of the entire hosting end to end process. We are not a data centre provider who offers hosting as a 'value added' service. Hosting is our core business.

We don't need our marketing department to dream up eloquent prose to describe the 'quality of our service' - we simply point to our ISO9001 & ISO27001 accreditations. We worked hard to achieve them - we're working as hard to retain them.

Whilst 'green' is definitely the new black, we have to admit that the data centre or server room is by design, an un-environmentally friendly building and it never will be 'green'. Powering and cooling data centres requires a lot of energy, which means that carbon footprints are high. It's estimated that the average data centre uses as much electricity as 4000 homes, and that globally, data centres generate between 100 million and 150m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. At iomart hosting, we recognise that we have a corporate and social responsibility to reduce our operating impact on the environment wherever we can. That's why we use Dell's Energy Smart savers, have installed the latest energy efficient cooling systems and are implementing virtualised environments wherever possible. We are founder signatories of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, ensuring that we will commit to implementing set of expected best practice and to annually report our energy consumption.

If you shop around, you will find bandwidth providers offering prices at least 90% of normal market prices. As ever there's a catch - low network and peering quality. If you are happy with slow transfer speeds, packet loss, and unreliability, then please feel free to buy. We only offer bandwidth from Tier 1 back bone providers. We have numerous high quality peering arrangements in place to ensure that your data doesn't tour the country before arriving at its final destination. You do get what you pay for.

Given these uncertain economic times, it is always comforting to know that your hosting provider, who may well be holding your entire business in their hands, has the funds to ride out the financial maelstrom. iomart hosting is 100% owned by AIM listed iomart group plc, one of the UK's largest hosting companies, and as such is financially sound and secure.