Hosting
At VRB, we do not operate our own servers. There are a lot of server companies out there – some you may be familiar with.
Our clients like to have a “one-stop store” for their website needs and to this end, we have several server options we maintain through hosting reseller accounts. We have accounts with several selected and tested providers to ensure we have managed options for our clients.
We will advise you which of our managed, reseller hosting services we suggest for your site application – or we are delighted to work with your own hosting company too*
Where we supply your hosting, we monitor the server availability (uptime) and speed. Where we see issues, we proactively contact the server provider to make a report and bring the issue to a resolution. We often know server providers have an issue before they do.
Many server providers talk about 99.99% uptime and, over a year, this is mostly accurate – but for 18 years, we have been monitoring our client sites and we have learned that our overwatch is a good strategy.
Our managed server options are:
1. Legacy Hosting “MegaServer”
We have had this same hosting for 17 years. If you have been with VRB prior to 2019, you may well be using this host. Recent infrastructure changes on the server admin prevent us from doing database building or remote connections so we sought alternative hosting for these projects. To this end, clients interfacing with systems like JewelBase and JewelConnect are now using our other services. This server continues to provide good response times and excellent uptime.
2. Shared “Servconfig1” Hosting
For “regular” sites that need to interface with database systems such as JewelBase and JewelConnect, we use shared hosting with our Serverconfig provider. This hosting does a good job with WordPress sites but can suffer from European hangtimes – meaning if you are a website owner with Euro users, this may not be the best option. For N.American clients, we see good response times for WordPress sites and excellent uptime.
3. VPSx Virtual Private Server
For advanced sites, sites requiring very fast response times, high-load sites as well as database-heavy applications, we use our VPSx provider hosting. This is specialist hosting with high-end processor and storage capabilities. It is a little expensive for basic sites and not really of much additional client value – it’s a bit too much for the job.
Obviously, VPSx has excellent response times and uptime.
Monitoring is done on all hosting plans with alerts to our team if hosting issues are detected. Legacy and Servconfig1 have basic uptime monitoring and VPSx has more advanced monitoring for response speed as well as other metrics to assist in the performance optimization of the sites running on it.
Email is available with our Legacy hosting but not with Servconfig1 or VPSx. We can easily secure you a great email provider using proven technology to run your email – we’ll discuss this with you.
* Subject to system capability, security and ability to run the sites we design for you.
