• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
HAHosting Logo. Four Blue Squares. Blue text HA, Grey Text Hosting as a single word

Call Us Today 0114 228 0022

Status Page   |  Client Login   |  Create a Support Ticket

Call Us Today
0114 228 0022

Hosting

The Benefits of Single Server Colocation

30/10/2019 by Chris Allen Leave a Comment

What are the Benefits of Single Server Colocation Hosting?

Why Colocation Hosting?

What is Single Server Colocation Hosting?

Colocation is a service provided, usually by Data Centres, based around server hosting. Put simply, you can give your server(s) to a Data Centre and they will make sure it has power, internet, cooling and is kept secure.
Colocation for a Single Server would be for, as the name suggests, one physical server. These are typically kept in a rack with multiple other servers that belong to other people. This makes it a much cheaper option than having your rack. Perfect for if you have one or a small number of servers.

Why Use Colocation for a Single Server?

Is paying for Colocation hosting for one server worth it? Can’t I host it myself?
The short answer is yes you could…If you like spending a lot of money wastefully. Let us explain.
A lot of the ‘hidden costs’ are often not considered when you need to buy a server. This is things like:
– Cooling
– Infrastructure
– Synchronous Internet
– Power
– Backup Power
– Security
– Room to Grow
– Someone to Manage it
– Noise Reduction
– Regular Maintenance

All these things should be considered when thinking about server hosting. Unfortunately, none of these things come cheap either. We find that if you have only a small number of servers, it’s usually not worth the large costs.
If you have many servers or can accommodate the room needed for growth in the future, then considering self-hosting could be an option.
If you’ll only be having singular or a few servers, we honestly think Single Server Colocation is worth considering for the reasons found below.

The Benefits of Single Server Colo

Uptime

The main job of a Colocation provider is to ensure that a high level of uptime is provided. It is common for most Data Centre’s to offer above a 99% uptime, with some claiming as much as 99.9%. This is achieved through the monitoring and maintenance of power, cooling and internet connections. It is common for most Colo providers to have multiple options in place for all the above, as a form of redundancy.

Security

Any good Data Centre will keep your server(s) safe by having multiple security features in place. We can’t speak for others, but at our Data Centre we have implemented:
– Lockable server racks
– Access control, limited to what people need only, by key fobs
– 24/7 external and internal CCTV
– Monitoring system on who enters the Data Centre
Another benefit of having your server be kept offsite from your main location is that it keeps it protected from fire, floods and theft where you’re situated. Typically, an offsite server or backup is much safer than an onsite one.

Cost

There are a lot of hefty setup costs that are needed for hosting servers. This is things like infrastructure, racks cooling and redundancy.
We find it is often way too expensive at a small scale, such as one or a small number of servers. And because i can also be very hard to predict when you will need to upgrade your setup and number of servers. As a result, overspending unnecessarily or delaying growth often occurs.

Colocation can work out much cheaper as the costs are fixed and typically the prices are inclusive. It works out cheaper as a Data Centre can split the costs across all their customers to cover it, making it much cheaper for their customers. Things often tend to be cheaper bought in bulk, which applies here too.

Grow as You Need it

Data Centres are built at such a scale to accommodate a vast number of servers. And because of this, there is almost always room to expand and grow what you need. This is particularly the case with Single Server Colocation hosting as it’s as simple as adding another server you own to the Data Centre.

Want to Know More?

If you would like to find out some more information about our Single Server Colocation, click here.

You can download our FREE PDF document going over our Single Server Colo in more detail.
Alternatively, you can find more of our blogs here.

Keep Up to Date

You can stay up to date with us on our social media profiles:

LinkedIn

Twitter

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Colocation, Hosting, Server

Website Performance & Optimisation

06/09/2019 by Chris Allen Leave a Comment

 

Website Performance & Optimisation

We all know that currently, a good website is key to online success. Your website’s performance and how well it ticks those SEO boxes can greatly increase traffic flow and engagements.

 

Website Optimisation

Website optimisation is about making your website work as efficiently as possible. This could be about having neat, efficient code or compressing images/video into the right format to reduce file sizes.

But why should you care about this?

Well the more optimised your website is, the faster it will work and load pages. This is key nowadays as the average person online expects a website to load in only 2 seconds! (We’ve got a blog on that if you want to know more). Furthermore, faster websites generally attract more traffic and convert more too.

47% of customers expect a website to load in 2 seconds graphic

How do you measure this?

There are plenty of tools available to check your website’s optimisation.

We’ve found Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to be very effective – with a bonus that it’s completely free! All you need to do is enter your website address and it’ll do all the rest.

Aiming for ‘100’

Google’s PageSpeed Insights gives your website a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop optimisation. Having a site be ‘100’ is the goal for everyone, however, it’s not the be-all and end-all for having a fast website…

 

 

Website Performance

Website Performance is a general term used for how ‘good’ a website is. Typically, this is based on the speed and responsiveness of your website. And while optimisation can make a difference to your site’s speed, you don’t necessarily have to have an optimised site for it to be fast.

 

A different kind of speed

As you may know, websites need to be ‘hosted’ on a platform of some kind to run.

This could be shared hosting, a private server or many other options. Each of these have they’re own pros and cons, with varying costs and performance. So why is this relevant? The platform your website is hosted on can make a dramatic difference to how fast your website loads.

You could have a very poorly optimised site score but still, have a lightning-fast website. This is because the infrastructure powering your site pulls up some of the slack.

How can you measure this?

There are various ways of measuring this speed. We particularly like GTMetrix. This one is free so that’s another bonus.

If you pay someone for hosting, they should be able to give you detailed reports of your site’s current performance. We do this with the Hosting we provide, which is how we get detailed reports. Like with the ones you can see when we made our site 10x Faster!

If nothing else, it’s reassuring to see how your site is performing – especially if you have a lower Google page score.

WordPress speed improvement graph
Our Website Performance Report

 

Which Is Better?

Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut answer to that one.

In an ideal world, you would have both be as best they can be. However, that would be both expensive and time-consuming. Here is a quick pros/cons summary of both.

Web Optimisation

Pros:

  • Boosts SEO ranking
  • Google ‘likes’ a high Google score
  • Looks good to customers if they check it
  • Improve speed

Cons:

  • Could be a long list of fixes
  • Fixes can be time-consuming & require regular maintenance
  • Can be expensive if you pay a web developer

 

Web Performance (Hosting)

Pros:

  • The immediate impact on site speed
  • Can make a significant difference
  • Simple if you’re buying hosting

Cons:

  • Must pay a monthly fee
  • Performance can vary depending on the amount spent (depends on provider)
  • Doesn’t improve Google score so can make your site look worse than it is

 

Our Recommendation

If you want our honest opinion, the easiest way to improve website speeds is to improve your website hosting.

It’s often inexpensive for smaller websites and whoever you sign up with should sort out the technical details needed to move your site. Easy.

If you’re looking for a faster WordPress site, you can find out a bit more on our Fast WordPress Hosting page 😉.

Of course, we also recommend improving the optimisation on your site, as this will help in the long run! However, if you’re looking for an instant and substantial improvement, upgrading your hosting is the better option.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Hosting, Information, SEO, Website, WordPress

Our WordPress Hosting Is Faster

27/06/2019 by Chris Allen Leave a Comment

Our Fast WordPress Hosting is Faster. 

 

We believe our WordPress Hosting is faster than most others.  

A bold claim. We know. Let us explain why we think that. 

 

What is ‘Fast’? 

Before explaining why we’re so fast, let’s quickly go over briefly what makes websites ‘fast’. The basics of what makes Hosting fast is the data transfer rate. This is how fast data can be transferred from one place to another. 

HDD: 

Data used to be stored on HDD’s (Hard Drive Disk) which contains mechanical moving parts and is generally limited to around 200MB/s. This is due to physical parts only being able to move so fast. Of course, the speed on any technology can vary depending on age, condition and its specs. 

SSD: 

Nowadays it’s much more common for data to be stored on SSD’s (Solid State Drive) as they are faster, more power-efficient and physically smaller. They also contain no moving parts and so typically last longer than HDD’s. The average SSD speeds clock in around 500MB/s – significantly quicker than an HDD. 

 

What Does This Mean for You? 

A faster transfer rate, put simply, means your website will load quicker. Generally, the faster your storage is the faster your website will be too. All elements that are data-heavy such as photos and video take longer to transfer due to being bigger file sizes.  

In this day and age, where images and video are almost necessary for businesses online, it’s important to have fast hosting that can handle it. 

 

What Makes Ours Different? 

Most hosting companies have setups based on SSD technology – having multiple large SSD’s set up that can host large amounts of websites. And this will make websites much faster than standard hosting. 

However, we believe ours is even faster. This is why. 

We use something called ‘Ceph’ storage. The easiest way to explain is that it’s a cluster of storage nodes that allow for advanced network management. 

Part of this infrastructure is something we use called ‘InfiniBand’ a network link that allows us to make use of a 40 Gbit link. In English, it means we have much more leeway with data transfer as there is less bottlenecking. This means that more data can go through the same ports at the same time, resulting in a faster data transfer rate. An easy way to think of it is like comparing a pin-prick in a bucket compared to a substantial hole. One lets much more water through at a time. The same applies to our InfiniBand. 

 

How Would This Impact Your WordPress? 

Making use of our hosting that uses this infrastructure means essentially will result in a MUCH faster website. Look below at the results we got when we moved our website to our new Fast WordPress Hosting. 

WordPress speed improvement graph

If you compare the two averages, before and after the switch (marked by the big drop), the result was our website loading 10x faster than before. A pretty big difference, right? And we like to think our website wasn’t exactly slow before the swap either. 

Want to Find Out More? 

If you want to find out more about the difference our Fast WordPress Hosting can make, then you can read a small case study we’ve put together based on the performance difference we saw. You can find that here: 

How We Achieved 10x Faster Speeds 

A Good Read

If you want to find out more about website hosting in general, why WordPress is so popular and the importance of fast hosting – our friends over at WPCity have made a comprehensive and well-sourced article about Hosting. If you’re interested in learning more about Website Hosting, in general, it’s well worth a read. You can find that article here.

 

Stay in the Loop 

If you want to keep up to date without the latest blog posts and news, then the best place to find that all is on our Social Media accounts. 

Facebook 

Twitter 

LinkedIn 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Fast WordPress Hosting, Hosting, Website, WordPress

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Blog (43)
  • HA Hosting Guides (11)
  • HA Hosting News (11)
  • HA Hosting Technical Blog (11)
  • Updates (20)

Recent Posts

  • Downtime Management
  • Colocation Hosting – How to Save Money
  • What is Single Server Colocation Hosting?
  • What Backup Software Should You Choose?
  • When Did You Last Update Your Backup Software?

Online Backup

Colocation

Virtual Servers

Telecoms

Contact

High Availability Hosting Limited
Holbrook Close, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK S20 3FJ

© 2020 High Availability Hosting Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Company Registration No. 6491361   |   VAT Registration No.  928954962 | All Prices Subject to VAT