One of the questions we get asked fairly regularly is:

“Why would we use a smaller datacentre provider when the big companies are cheaper?”

And to be fair, it’s a reasonable question.

If you compare prices online, especially for things like cloud storage or backups, companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure can look incredibly cheap at first glance.

For example, I’ll see storage advertised at around £7-8 per terabyte and think: “How can we compete with that?”

Honestly, in pure pricing terms, smaller providers usually can’t. At least not on paper.

But for a lot of small businesses, the cheapest-looking option doesn’t always end up being the simplest, the clearest, or even the cheapest once everything’s factored in.

The Problem With Comparing Datacentre Pricing

With large cloud providers, the pricing structure is often built around flexibility.

That works brilliantly if you’ve got in-house IT expertise and someone who understands:

• Storage tiers
• Bandwidth usage
• Infrastructure setup
• Cloud pricing models

But if you don’t, things can get confusing quite quickly.

What starts as just “£8 per terabyte” can eventually expand to include:

• Download charges
• Minimum retention periods
• Bandwidth costs
• Or extra fees based on usage

None of it is hidden exactly. But most small business owners don’t have the time to dig through pages and pages of small print just to work out what their monthly bill is likely to be.

And that’s usually where frustration starts.

What Small Businesses Actually Need From A Datacentre

For most SMEs, the priority isn’t squeezing every possible penny out of infrastructure costs.

You’ve got to know what things cost, what systems are reliable, if your backups are working properly, and have access to support if something goes wrong (which in my experience, it always does eventually).

That’s why we’ve always tried to keep things straightforward…

One clear price and no surprise costs.

Just predictable pricing and support when you need it.

The Part Most People Forget: Customer Support

There’s another thing that often gets overlooked when comparing datacentre providers…

What happens when you actually need help?

Because eventually, everyone does.

Something doesn’t behave how you expected, you need to change something quickly, or you’ve just got a question and want a straight answer from a real person.

That’s where the experience between providers can become very different.

With many larger providers, support usually starts like this:

Step 1: Log a ticket

Step 2: Wait for someone to pick it up

That’s fine in some situations. But when it’s urgent, or when you simply want reassurance you’re doing something correctly, waiting hours or days for a reply is never ideal.

Why Smaller Datacentre Providers Can Be Better For SMEs

One of the advantages of working with a smaller datacentre provider is getting that accessibility.

If you need something from us, you can just pick up the phone. No ticket needed.

Then, you’re immediately into that conversation with someone who understands your setup and can help sort things quickly.

And while that’s difficult to show on a pricing comparison page, it often makes a huge difference day to day. Especially for small businesses without a dedicated in-house IT team.

So, What’s The Best Datacentre For A Small Business?

Honestly, it depends on the type of business you are.

If you’ve got experienced internal IT staff and you’re comfortable managing everything yourself, going directly to a large cloud provider might make perfect sense.

But if you value:

• Predictable pricing
• Managed backups
• Straightforward infrastructure
• Personal support
• And being able to speak to someone quickly…

Then a smaller datacentre provider will likely be a much better fit.

Because the real cost usually isn’t just the monthly price – it’s the amount of time, stress, and troubleshooting involved afterwards.

And for most business owners, having someone there to help when needed is worth far more than saving a couple of quid a month.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken the kids to Tropical World, Eureka! The National Children’s Museum, and Jodrell Bank Observatory.

They’ve loved it. Properly loved it.

Although, as you can probably imagine, they’re not too bothered about reading anything. It’s straight to the interactive bits. Press this, pull that, what does this button do?

Meanwhile, I’m trailing slightly behind trying to read the boards before they drag me off to the next thing…

I’ve found the only way to keep up is to stay one exhibit ahead. Sneak a quick read, take it in, then catch up with them.

And honestly, it’s not that much different from running a business in tech.

Things move quickly.

There’s always something new. New tools, new risks, new ways of doing things. And if you’re not careful, you end up just reacting to whatever’s in front of you, without ever really getting to grips with what’s going on underneath.

But the detail matters.

You can get away with skimming for a while, but eventually it catches up with you. Whether that’s in the form of a security issue, systems slowing down under pressure, or infrastructure that simply can’t scale with the business anymore.

The problem is, properly understanding all of that takes time. And if you’re running a business, time is usually the one thing you don’t have much of.

Most people don’t ignore it on purpose. It just slips. It becomes one of those things you’ll “look into properly” when things quieten down a bit.

They rarely do.

That’s essentially where we come in.

Our job is to stay on top of the underlying technology, understand what’s changing, and make sure the IT infrastructure supporting your business is doing what it should.

So you don’t have to stop what you’re doing every five minutes to figure it out yourself.

You can just get on with running your business, knowing things like your backups, storage, server performance, and security are being looked after properly.

Why Scalable Infrastructure Matters

There was another thing that stood out on all these museum trips.

A lot of the places offer annual passes. You pay once, and you can come back as many times as you like. No pressure to see everything in one go. No worrying about whether you’re making the most of the day.

You just use it when you need it.

That’s pretty much how we think about virtual servers for business.

They’re built so you don’t have to second-guess how much you’ll use them.

If your website gets busy, it copes. If the business grows, it scales with you. If your team needs more storage or better performance, it’s already there.

No awkward ceilings. No scrambling to upgrade systems because you’ve suddenly outgrown them. And no surprise costs because you’ve had a good month.

A good virtual server should quietly support the business in the background, giving you the flexibility to grow without constantly worrying about bandwidth, uptime, or whether your systems can handle demand.

That’s really the point of properly managed IT infrastructure.

And that’s really the point of all of this.

Most business owners don’t want to become experts in infrastructure, backups, or security. Nor should they have to.

They just need to know it’s handled.

(The same way I don’t need to memorise every plaque in a museum – I just like knowing I’ve not missed anything important!)

The Importance of Downtime Management

Recently a major service we use (not naming names) went down for almost the entire day. We get that downtime can happen unexpectedly. However, this didn’t stop the fact that we had no access to several core functions our team use daily. Thankfully all issues were resolved within a day, their downtime management could have been better.

This does highlight why having resilient hosting, with enough redundancy is important though.

 

A Good Example of Things Out of Your Control

Here is part of the (modified to keep names private) email we received explaining the issue mentioned earlier:

What happened?

The application and website are securely hosted on AWS, which normally provides an exemplary level of service.

Unfortunately, AWS incorrectly believed there was an administrative issue with our account that temporarily suspended all access.

As AWS only provides ticket-based support with minimal escalation options this took longer than expected to resolve.

                                                                                                                                                       

Will this happen again?

Access has been reinstated, and we’re in the process of rectifying with AWS their information.

Additionally, we now have a dedicated point of contact in place to ensure any issues in the future can be resolved more promptly.

We do not expect this particular issue to happen again.

We know that access to your processes and tasks is critical to how you manage your business.

 

Why Mention This?

You may be wondering, why mention any of this?

We’re not looking to name & shame anyone. We of all people know that things can go wrong unexpectedly and we have tried to improve our own downtime management.

Instead, we thought it would be good to highlight the importance of making sure the service providers you use have the appropriate measures in place for when things do go wrong. Here are a couple of key things we think you should have when downtime occurs:

 

Clear Communications

Ideally, you want clear & prompt communication with your service provider. Often a lot of the frustration in these situations can come from the lack of information about why you can’t access the services you need – especially if the service in question impacts your customers.

Some transparency, in a timely manner, goes a long way in our experience.

 

Estimates and Updates

From our own experiences, we’ve found that providing regular updates about how the solution to the issues is coming along, helps a lot with managing frustrations and the feeling of waiting around.

If possible, getting estimated times when a fix might be in place can do wonders. This means you can let your customers know when they can expect for normal services to resume.

However, from first-hand experience, these estimates can often change as work is done, so take them with a pinch of salt. Sometimes fixes are quicker than expected and sometimes things are more complicated than first thought.

 

What We Try to Do at HA Hosting

As much as we’d like to avoid it, downtime does happen to us sometimes. When it does, this is what we like to do:

• Updates the Status Page, addressing the downtime.
• Regular updates to the status page, giving progress reports on any fixes and what the actual issues were in the first place
• When possible, try to give rough timeframes of how long a fix might take
• Update timeframes as and when we know it might take longer

The reason we like to make use of the Status Page is that it gives all our customers one place they know they can go to. This means we can update it quickly, and get on with fixing the issues at hand.

 

You can find the Status Page by clicking here or find it at any time by going to the top of the Homepage of the HA website.

How to Save Money with Colocation Hosting

Colocation Hosting

As you may know, Colocation can be a very powerful form of Hosting. It lets you have all the advantages of having your own servers but without the huge upfront costs of infrastructure set up & also means you don’t have to worry about maintaining uptime.
A good Data Centre will do its best to make sure that your Colocation Hosting has great uptime, via expert management of power, cooling, network, and security.

Start Saving Money on Your Colocation Hosting

There are a couple of different ways in which you can save a bit of money with your Colocation Hosting.
– Pay-as-you-go power
– Energy-efficient servers
As you know electricity is getting more and more expensive. One way to help mitigate some of these costs would be to look at setting up your Colocation hosting with a Data Centre that uses a ‘Pay as You Go’ power system.
This is as exactly as it sounds. You are only charged for the power you use. Sounds simple right?
This requires the Data centre to have the systems in place to take regular readings, and then work out how much to charge. The downside to this is that you can have a variable monthly bill, depending on what you use your server for.

As mentioned earlier, another way to reduce the cost of your Colocation is to invest in a more energy-efficient server. This will simply mean your server overall will use less power for the tasks it needs to perform. Typically, these are more modern machines, and possibly more expensive initially to buy.

What impacts how much power a server uses:

• Age
• Older servers are generally less efficient, so use more power. This also means they run hotter and require more cooling.
• CPU usage
• If a server is carrying out complex calculations it will use more CPU and therefore more power. However, a high proportion of servers are idle for a lot of the time.
• Hard Drives
• A server with a lot of busy hard drives will use more electricity than one with a similar amount of SSD (Solid State Drives)
• Temperature
• A server that is running hot will spin its fans at a higher speed and this will mean that it uses more electricity. This can be caused by missing or failed fans, poor airflow, or obstructions at the front or back.

 

Calculate Your Costs

We’ve provided a tool you can use which will give an estimate of how much you can expect a 1U server to cost, with differing amounts of power usage.
Click the link below and feel free to see how much you could expect to pay, and possibly save, on your Colocation.

Calculate Your Colocation Power Costs

 

Get in Touch

Contact us via our website

 

What is Single Server Colocation Hosting?

So, we’ve chatted about Colocation before and it’s one of the core services we provide here at HA Hosting. But what exactly is Colocation?

 

A Quick Rundown

Colocation is a service where a provider will offer the facilities to hold your physical servers for you. They will provide power, internet, temperature management, and security, to make sure your server stays running as much as possible.

They will often have rack space available, to which your server(s) are installed. You are then given the appropriate information and means to access your server 24/7.

The biggest benefit is that you can have the benefits of having your servers but without the huge costs of setting up your server room. This is often ideal for IT companies who have a lot of servers but don’t want/have the room to store them all in-house.

Colocation services are usually paid for month by month.

 

What’s the Benefit of Single Server Colocation Hosting?

The biggest benefit is that you can have the benefits of having your servers without the upfront/ongoing costs. Setting up and managing a server room is expensive after all.

This is usually much better for businesses that don’t need to necessarily have their services immediately on hand.

Another benefit is that the facilities/process are specifically put in place to ensure constant uptime/access. On top of this, the conditions of the server and server room are monitored by experts. So, if anything goes wrong you can be informed straight away as well as fix the issue as soon as possible.

Any decent Data Centre will have the appropriate security measures in place to make sure your servers stay safe. We can’t speak for others, but our Colocation is protected by:

• 24/7 CCTV
• Controlled-access areas (restricted by designated key fobs)
• Number-locked colocation racks.

To go with this, we follow the ISO27001 framework to help ensure data security. The security of your data shouldn’t be something you should have to worry about!

Another benefit that people forget about is that it means your servers are kept off-site from you. This means in the case of any fires/floods/theft, that your data/servers are kept safe. Meaning your services can stay up and consistent no matter what.

 

Isn’t Colocation Expensive?

You may think initially yes. However, when compared to the costs of keeping and managing your server facilities the cost is significantly less. It’s no secret that constant server maintenance can be expensive. The hardware alone can cost a small fortune. Also, if your business means you need those server facilities for it to operate, then it’s usually worth the investment.

 

Want to Know More?

This blog post has just gone over some of the basics of Colocation. If you would like to know more about Colocation you can take a look at our Colocation page on our website, which will tell you a lot more about it. From tech specs to overall usage.

Also, if you have a specific question about Colocation or want to know if it would be right for you, you can get in touch with us here. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can, hopefully giving you the information, you need.

Feel free to follow us on social media if you want to keep up to date with what we’re up to.

LinkedIn

 

Choosing what backup software to use can be complicated. There are many factors to consider and unfortunately, there is no one ‘best choice’ as every person’s or business’ requirements will be different.

With that being said, here are a few pointers to get you in the right direction. You can use some of these prompts to help you start making a shortlist of the software that would be more suitable for you.

Does it Backup What You Need it to?

• Operating Systems?
• Storage Devices
• Virtualization

Where Do You Want to Backup to?

• Local Network
• Own Remote Site
• Rest of the World

Advanced Features Such as DR & BC?

• Features that are ‘nice to have’
• Features that would present sales opportunities

Licensing Costs

• Is The Pricing Reasonable?
• Is The Licensing Easy to Understand?
• If Monthly – Is There a Minimum Commitment? Minimum term or spend?

Do You Need Your Backup Software to Overcome a Specific Scenario?

Internet Backup