You have been directed to this page because you are a customer of Archronos Ltd that has been identified as being able to benefit from a new hosting platform.
Times are tough for everyone at present with spiralling costs across the board. This is as true for those buying petrol as it is using electricity.
Computer systems are no exception. Whilst the minutia of web hosting is really boring (it really is) the fact remains that websites have to sit on a computer somewhere 24/7 using electricity.
To this end our usual hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), are upping some of their costs. But we believe that given the usage your websites see over a given 24hr period you would benefit from moving provider, away from AWS. This should enable us to keep hosting prices for you exactly the same as they are now.
However something will change, though we hope 99.9% of you, and your users will not notice any difference in performance. Below are some questions we think you will want to know the answer to, but as ever please do contact us in the usual ways if you have any questions at all.
What’s changing?
In short, at present your website is hosted somewhere in Manchester on one of Amazon’s (yes the same one you’re thinking of) many many servers.
The change will place your website onto a server located within our company premises in Basingstoke.
Whilst this will increase the electricity usage of our premises, we believe it will be negligible increase compared to other planned changes we have happening and will allow us to keep your monthly bill the same as it now.
Will I have to pay anything?
Absolutely not.
The migration process will be handled by us as part of our standard maintenance activities.
When will it happen?
We are hoping to begin migrating customers who are suitable for this migration over by the end of the week, however because of the nuances of the internet we will run all systems in parallel until we are 100% certain it has worked. This will likely be until the end of July.
Will I/my users notice a difference?
This is impossible to say categorically. It depends on internet speeds of various computers.
However we have spent the last 2 months testing, and with the UK average broadband speed of ~50Mbps there should be negligible difference. We will be sending the data to each of your users at around this speed (minimum) meaning you’ll get the data just as fast as you can consume it and not be waiting around for us.
In the very unlikely event you do notice a performance difference there are some things we can do to improve it yet further free of charge, which we may implement anyway time allowing. Though anything you do notice will likely be negligible.
Truthfully, if it wasn’t for us trying to be transparent (do let us know if this is helpful or not), you probably wouldn’t know any of this has happened.
What if i want to stay with Amazon?
You are more than welcome to, just let us know, but the average price increase will be £13pcm or ~43p per day (ex VAT) as they are increasing their standing charge to cover costs, and the benefits or remaining won’t be huge.
Is it secure?
Yes! We pride ourselves on the security of our systems, and that includes yours. Just because it’s on a computer in our office doesn’t mean it’s any less secure.
What will the uptime SLA changes be?
At present we are very proud that we have 99.986% uptime (across all customers and servers) and our current SLA of 99.95%.
Unfortunately, we can’t command the same kind of SLAs with the infrastructure owners (BT/Virgin Media/Cable&Wireless/etc) so we will have to lower our SLA to be a bit more realistic. The new SLA will be 99.5% over any given month.
This is roughly 3 hours and 40 minutes of downtime in a month. We really do think we will manage much higher than this, but we need to be realistic. If a problem happens, it will take slightly longer for fixes to propagate to the internet.
Basingstoke lost internet recently – will this effect me?
Some of you may have seen in the news last week that a construction company severed 700 fibre optic and copper cables cutting off phone and internet for 4000 properties in Basingstoke.
Whilst one of our internet connections was effected, we have multiple redundant connections with multiple different providers to protect against exactly this kind of issue.
Our connectivity was unaffected and we remained online through out, however we did have to operate at slightly higher risk as lost one of our 5 redundancies, but none of our customers that are already hosted on premises went off line at all.
We are also pleased to report all our connections are back up and running again.