Running a hosting company is easy.
Running a hosting company well, and doing the right thing by customers, is not.
Spinning up servers and a support and billing suite is an easy business and can be achieved in half a day's work. The hard work comes when building up customers, being able to cater to their needs, and doing the right thing to keep them by your side - through thick and thin.
Many elements go into hosting. The most commonly desired of which include Support, Uptime, Performance, and Security. You can have a highly performant product, but if the support waiting on the other side isn't of any help when things go wrong, it can seem like there's no end in sight when it comes to getting back on the straight and narrow. Alternatively, you can have hosting with fast and effective customer service - but if the product is no good, customer service is irrelevant.
For over 3,000 days, we've been on a mission to blend all of those things into one neat package, at prices that won't break the bank.
Sounds good, right? Keep reading to find out more!
We don't just communicate with black and white text! To support our customers as best as we possibly can,
we frequently turn to screen recording to demonstrate processes, assist in troubleshooting customer websites, and so on.
This is one of the reasons our support sets us back from the competition, as visuals are easier for people to understand, and can demonstrate issues that plain text cannot!
We solve the majority of tickets in a single reply. Chances are you've contacted a company before, and expected an issue or request to be handled quickly, and with no fuss,
only to find out that it takes ten replies back and forth instead. At Ethernet Servers, we do as much leg-work as we possibly can, meaning that we successfully resolve the vast majority
of support tickets in just a single reply. That means less time writing emails, and more time eating cake (in other words: the process is a piece of cake!).
We review all tickets upon closure to see how we can get better! Being the best we can be is very important to us.
It's for that reason that when a ticket is closed (i.e. solved or fixed), time is taken to carefully analyse it, to find room for improving our service. Many of the improvements we deliver
to our service are directly based on the tickets we receive. For example, a ticket came in recently where a customer wanted one-click Webmail login enabled for their DirectAdmin server. This occurred to us
to be a fantastic idea, and so it's now a part of our stack that we deploy for every new customer!
Our servers are monitored 24/7/365. Some companies rely on their customers to tell them something isn't working. Not us! We use a third-party monitoring system, NodePing, and monitor all nodes for SSH connectivity, not ping! The problem with monitoring for ping connectivity is quite simple: a server can respond to ping (or, "ICMP"), but not be serving requests as it should. By monitoring SSH connectivity, we know for certain our servers are online.
Our servers undergo regular health checks. Sometimes, when a server goes offline, it's due to a hardware fault. It's for this reason our team constantly monitors the hardware, including, but not limited to: the RAID array, Battery Backup Unit (BBU), temperatures (overheating can result in failures), and Memory/RAM. Additionally, routine checks of IPMI (or, "out-of-band" access) are performed, to ensure that we can always access our servers, even in the very rare event that the operating systems become unavailable. This allows us to quickly fix any issues without needing support from on-site data center technicians.
Backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Included with every service we offer is a 100% uptime guarantee, with compensation should we fail to achieve that. Fantastic uptime is something we pride ourselves on, and,
if we knew that we couldn't deliver it, we wouldn't guarantee it! By hosting with us, you have a reliable platform to keep your e-commerce website, game server, or blog online - night and day.
A 100% SSD infrastructure. To create a highly-performant environment, you need hardware that's up to the job. There are no slow mechanical hard drives sitting around here, we use 100% SSD storage for all equipment that we operate. This means that we have all the Disk I/O in the world, essential in ensuring that data is written to and from disks as quickly as possible, which means you and your visitors get fast page load times.
Only the latest software. We obsess over using the latest software! Not only does this keep our infrastructure secure,
but it means we can take advantage of all the latest and greatest performance improvements available to Linux, and our vendors of ours (i.e. SuperMicro - we only use quality SuperMicro gear!).
You won't catch us running end-of-life operating systems or software. Blending the latest software and hardware is what dreams are made of.
Finely tuned configurations, warp speed ahead! We know that excellent performance helps to make happy customers,
which is why our servers are carefully optimised for performance. For example, we use Redhat's dynamic tuning service
which monitors workloads in real-time and adapts as needed to ensure great network, CPU, and disk performance! We make many micro-optimisations to minimise system CPU usage,
allowing us to give that power back to our customers and their needs!
Global triple-layer authentication. We don't just use passwords to keep our systems safe, but rather, a combination of passwords, IP restrictions, and two-factor authentication. This means that not only is your personal information safe, but the same applies to the data you host with us. Ransomware attacks amongst hosting providers are a threat and we make every effort to ensure the highest level of security.
SSL Encryption. Everywhere. Our billing area, cPanel/WHM/Webmail login areas, VPS control panel - you name it. Our entire infrastructure has forced SSL with 256-bit encryption, meaning that your sessions are protected against unwanted eyes! Browse with confidence knowing that the data you send us is safe. Additionally, fully up-to-date OpenSSL package libraries are maintained.
2 Trillion Year Passwords. You may be surprised to learn that many web hosts use templates which means that the password you receive is shared amongst their other customers too. This is bad! When you order with us, we randomly generate a password for you that, by today's standards, would take over 2 trillion years to be cracked, meaning bruteforcing is a non-issue, and that your data stays firmly in your hands.
