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Webhosting & Web Servers

Understand what you pay for

Confused about your website hosting? You're not alone.

The web hosting marketplace is a tangle of providers, resellers, wouldbe experts and power advertising. With little standard terminology, services are hard to comprehend and harder to compare.

What matters?

Key factors include:

  1. Server specifications that affect your website's availability, security & speed;
  2. How the server is managed: security, backups, extra bandwidth to allow for high traffic days;
  3. 24/7 support with fast turnaround.
What's best?

A small-medium business without IT staff of its own needs maximum website performance with minimal administration.

We believe the answer is:

  1. fully managed webhosting;
  2. a dedicated scalable cloud web server;
  3. tight controls on access to the server.

Hosting definitions

  • Web hosting, email hosting
    +

    ...akin to renting a house or flat. You need somewhere to live, with the right resources. So does your website. So does your email account.

    Hosting provides the resources, along with a publicly known 'address' for people to visit (your website) or to send letters (emails), anytime.

  • Web server
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    ...a computer (hardware + software + physical connection to Internet) specially set up to 'host' websites.

    • Your website's web server can be anywhere in the world.
    • The server needs to run - and have fast, reliable connection to the worldwide web - 24 hours a day, every day.
    • A web server can be 'visited' by 1000s of computers every day, and simultaneously transfer data to and from 100's or 1000's of computers around the world.
  • Mail server
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    ...a computer (or part of a computer) specially set up to host email.

    Not all webhosting services supply email hosting on your own domain. That's because email management is notoriously difficult and client support for email problems can be very timeconsuming.

    At SuttonNet, we regard own-domain email as essential for businesses. So we supply a free email service for every website that we host. Extra mailboxes or larger mailboxes are available on a fee for service basis.

    Those clients who need feature-rich mail hosting have their email hosted elsewhere: eg they use MS Office 365. They can still have their website hosted with SuttonNet.

  • Managed webhosting
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    ...where the hosting service looks after your website settings and email settings on the web server, updates software and makes sure the site keeps running well.

    The alternative is for each website owner to look after their own site's hosting. That is done via their customer interface to the server.

    SuttonNet only offers managed hosting. We lease the right servers, configured to suit our custom built websites, and take care of every hosting need for your website and email.

    • You need no hosting skills or time away from your core business.
    • Your website is safe from untrained hands.
    • There is less risk of a security breach.
  • Server specifications
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    ...affect how well your website runs. They include:

    • server size (storage of various kinds) and type (eg cloud, VPS)
    • software (a combination of many software packages)
    • hardware
    • physical location and facilities (eg temperature & humidity control, physical security)
    • speed of data transfer (how long your webpages take to load)
    • service level agreement (SLA): server hardware & software uptime per month
    • storage or traffic (bandwidth) limits overall & per client
    • redundancy (how much extra data transfer/storage there is, to cover high-use days and site growth)
    • security
    • backups (preferably daily)
    • who has access to the server
    • support.

    You can read our server's specs here.

  • Cloud hosting
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    ... a set of computers (and other devices) that share hosting for a group of websites. If one device breaks down or needs maintenance, the others automatically take over. The websites aren't affected.

    Cloud servers are easy to expand (scale up) whenever more storage space is needed.

  • Dedicated server
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    ...a server specially set up for and managed by one user. One 'user' could mean a hosting service; or a large business that has its own web server.

    A complication here: a web server can be part of a larger computer, fenced off from the rest by having its own operating system and restricted user access. This 'dedicated server' has its own software, and it can't be accessed from other parts of the larger unit. But there might actually be many such servers on the one computer.

Your hosting

SuttonNet combines dedicated server and cloud technology with fully managed hosting.

  • We get expert advice & support from a specialist server provider, who maintains the general server infrastructure - both software & hardware. We look after the webhosting + email hosting side.
  • Software & server management are tailored for best performance of websites.
  • We control how many websites are on our server & how much storage/bandwidth is in reserve for website expansion & extra busy days. That way, busy websites aren't slow websites.
  • No one except SuttonNet, a few designated clients (for their own websites) and our server support team can access the server interface.
  • We control and can track via logs, all activity on the server.

Last updated 15 November 2020