We have been providing virtual dedicated servers to UK businesses since 2002, and continue to lead our competition with our Miniserver VM^® virtualisation technology. Unlike many others, though, we give you dedicated resources (not burstable), which means enhanced performance and security. We typically put roughly 15 virtual machines on each physical host server.

Combined with cPanel/WHM a Miniserver^® VM virtual server gives you a fully featured Web-host-in-a-box suitable for hosting one or many low-intensity Web sites with associated services such as email. Ideal for Web designers, small Web hosts and SME's who want their own dedicated bit of the Internet.

Some Web sites or applications, perhaps due to their size (such as a photographer's image store), level of visitors (a busy forum), or load activity (an e-commerce site) are too resource-intensive to be hosted on a virtual machine.

For such applications we recommend a fully dedicated server committed to that sole task. Many of our clients start out on a Miniserver VM^® and then scale up to a fully dedicated server as they require, and we are quite happy to assist with that process. How to specify such a server depends on the exact requirement, and we are happy to assist you in tailoring a solution to your needs.

We offer a range of storage solutions. For users with high-performance requirements (eg. large databases) where a lot of CPU and RAM is needed as well as the data, we have the Dell PE2950 with 8 x 2.5" drive bays and the super-green VeryPC Lyceaus with 24 x 2.5" bays. Both servers have twin quad core processors, and a large RAM capacity.

For a pure-storage requirement we have the attached-storage Coraid solutions, with 16 & 24 disks, which must be used with another server.

Some high-end applications, such as a busy e-commerce site or complex online application may simply be too much load for one server to cope with - especially at peak times. In such circumstances we can assist you in designing a custom server cluster using Performance Patrol to meet your requirements. That might simply be a twinned database server and Web front end, or a large cluster with multiple slaved servers for maximum resilience and scalability.

When specifying such a system, we would normally recommend that any database is hosted on a dual-processor server with plenty of RAM and SCSI-equivalent hard drives. The front-end application servers can normally be of a fairly low specification, and more can be added in as the load increases.