Anyone recommend a good company for enterprise solution please?

meady100

meady100

meady100

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I'm a graphic designer, my client has about 50 employees, over two offices in the UK, utilising email heavily, (is it normal nowadays to have an email service which is not reliant on one server so that if something goes down the service stays up?). Can anyone recommend a good company in terms of reliability and support? Rather it was a large company than small. Already had a nightmare with a smallish local firm having email go down all the time, emails dropped etc etc. Looking for an established brand which is well known name for reliability and quality - sort of like a BMW of the hosting world.

My client also has a large database of their own clients which is essential to the business - this would obviously need to be transferred too, which I assume most companies would be able to take care of.

Anyone?! Thanks!
 
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meady100 said:
I'm a graphic designer, my client has about 50 employees, over two offices in the UK, utilising email heavily and they need a website hosting too. Can anyone recommend a good company in terms of reliability and support?
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A good company that does what? Someone to host email and web?

Need to know what it is they actually want before giving suggestions :)
 
Yes, sorry looking for email, website hosting with existing database integration. Thanks! Really looking for a 'name' in the industry that is proven after getting fingers burned with someone smalltime.
 
bigredshark said:
They'll be fine for basic stuff but aren't best of breed technology wise, if you want that you pay more.
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You also have to be careful that if you want more, and pay more, but they actually deliver less. :p

As with anything, do thorough research and investigate/post questions to plenty of companies to get a wide range of proposals

Find out about SLAs - what happens when things go wrong, how soon you can expect them to be fixed, etc, and what happens in terms of recompense if things aren't back up and running within a certain amount of time. There are providers, for instance, that have a 100% uptime SLA - but pay out 1 day of credit for every 1 hour (over the first hour) that your service is down - so they could be down for 15 hours before you'd get half your monthly fee back.

If your business stands to lose money from downtime, calculate the losses that you may incur, and make changes as appropriate to your hosting budget.
 
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Beansprout said:
To help the OP, what would you recommend?
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Well my recommendations for best of breed hosting providers are one post up from yours - for the OP, it's not clear exactly what he needs, wants and what technical knowledge he has. Depending on that he may be OK with something cheaper.

For resilient web hosting and email, a couple of VPSs with different providers, roll your own web and email setup add a DNS load balancing service (like sitebacker - ultradns - or any other GSLB style product) is going to provide reliability at the lowest possible price but requires real technical knowledge to setup and maintain. Or the providers listed above will offer that, set most of it up for you and manage it day to day but at several times the price.
 
Thanks, makes sense but I think you've overlooked that there are an awful lot of compaines on the list who are well-reviewed and offer all sorts (eg one is a pricey company which runs FT vmware setups) so to dismiss them all as "not best of breed" is possibly understandable, but couldn't be further from the truth.

As daz says sometimes you have to be careful of paying more to larger companies and getting less..

OP - another place to look / post requirements is www.webhostchat.co.uk where there are a lot of high-quality UK hosts who'll give you a multitude of options to choose from at all sorts of price points and complexities :)
 
Beansprout said:
Thanks, makes sense but I think you've overlooked that there are an awful lot of compaines on the list who are well-reviewed and offer all sorts (eg one is a pricey company which runs FT vmware setups) so to dismiss them all as "not best of breed" is possibly understandable, but couldn't be further from the truth.
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Well that's what I'd say the problem is, thinking that's best of breed. If they're running that with v-motion and redundant mirrored SANs then fair enough, but given the prices I doubt it very much. It's the difference between doing load balancing on Linux boxes or on chassis based Serverirons. Having 40Gb/s of bandwidth and the luxury of laughing off 1GB/s+ DDOS attacks. The costs of this sort of thing mean it's only the companies hosting 100k+ websites and charging more than £5 a month for it that can afford that type of technology. Whether you need that is a decision for you.

I've nothing against the smaller players, for most people an intelligently configured KVM host is easily good enough but it's not best of breed and you need to be aware of that going into it.

Basically, I'm saying, the very best won't feature on the host review list because they aren't interested in the small scale business of the people who're doing the reviewing. Ask providers who they're big customers are - see how many names you recognise...

I'm not saying disregard that list, I'm saying keep in mind that among the very best providers don't feature on it for quite innocent reasons.
 
That's why you should ask as many questions as possible of any provider you're thinking of going with, whether large or small. Detailed specifics regarding the technical implementation should always be provided whoever you're looking to go through - don't assume you're getting "the best" just because you're paying top whack.
 
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