Your data is valuable and keeping it safe is as important to us as it is to you. We therefore employ the latest, cutting edge technology and the best data protection practices to ensure that your applications run at high speed and your data can never be lost or damaged.
 

The UKGold web hosting platform is designed exclusively around high-speed Dell servers with dual Quad Core Intel Xeon processors. Several layers of hardware and software redundancy have been built in to ensure the utmost level of data protection. All servers are fitted with dual power supplies and network adaptors and there is RAID mirroring of the dual SCSI system hard drives. There is also 100% server redundancy which means that in the unlikely event of a server failure, another identically configured machine instantaneously switches in to take over the failed server's workload with no interruption to the server's processes and absolutely no loss of data.
 

Data is stored in state-of-the art network disk arrays. Following best practice, all arrays are RAID configured so that in the event of the failure of any disk in the array, no stored data can be lost. As a further level of security, all arrays are operated in mirrored pairs. Data is automatically synchronised between the arrays so that in the event of an array failing for any reason, the other identical array continues to work with no data loss and, just as importantly for time-critical applications, no downtime. Finally, to fully guarantee against data loss, each array is also backed up each night to a separate backup cluster which is then written to tape and stored offsite.
 

Many web hosting companies offer the choice of UNIX or Windows-based servers. After careful consideration, we have decided not to do this and instead to standardise on a 100% UNIX platform. We believe this offers both cost and stability benefits to our customers with few, if any, disadvantages. Customers can still easily develop, test and run their applications on their office or home Windows-based PCs with the addition of a web server such as Abyss or Apache for Windows which are both free, before uploading them to our UNIX-based servers.

Linux is the leading UNIX software and Redhat the leading Linux provider. Redhat Linux has been the number one choice for web hosting companies over many years because of its scalability and its track record as the most stable server operating system available. UKGold systems run on Redhat Enterprise Linux, the most stable release of Redhat Linux and the only version that keeps completely up to date with all security patches.
 

The UKGold web hosting system has multiple connections to the Internet with several different backbone providers. Should any one connection fail, the other connections automatically take over to accept all the traffic. This mean that it is highly unlikely that connectivity to the Internet will be lost. It also means that traffic moving to and from the network has several different paths available to reach its final destination and has been configured to always take the quickest one.
 

The UKGold web hosting system runs on industry-leading switches and routers from Cisco Systems. The network is also based on gigabit technology, which means that it runs at a speed of 1000 Mb per second. This is 10 times faster than most web other web hosting networks, which are limited to 100 Mb per second.

The network also utilises 100% CAT6 network cable. This contains four pairs of copper wire which, unlike CAT5, are all utilised. CAT6 supports Gigabit (1000 Mbps) Ethernet and supports communications at more than twice the speed of CAT5e, the other popular standard for Gigabit Ethernet cabling.