managed hosting services

Host it yourself!

Many of our clients host their solutions within their existing networks or on their own hosting platforms. If this fits the bill for you then we are happy to work with your IT team to provide any support they may need to deploy and manage an application we have created. It is not unusual for a close relationship to form and for us to work with or around IT teams to provide support and management of sites hosted internally. Having worked on internal applications with The Scottish Government, The Royal Bank of Scotland and Microsoft as well as numerous local authorities and highly secure networks Storm is accustomed to making these relationships work for the long term.

Shared Hosting

Storm has a shared hosting platform consisting of 4 servers which are created and managed only by us and used only for the applications we build or are supporting. For many clients this is an ideal hosting solution because it is tailored for the applications, it is competitively priced and it affords great access for us to support and manage your applications moving forward. Being shared does not mean it is any less secure, nor that it will have any conflicting technologies. Since we manage the environment and build the software for it we are able to ensure a highly optimised service.

With this solution you get:

• Unlimited bandwidth
• Firewall and automatic security patches and anti-virus protection
• 24/7 monitoring of Server and Network
• 24/7 duty engineer contact with 4 hr call out time
• Service Level Agreement SLA – 99.9% up time guarantee
• Daily incremental database and web server backups
• Installation of security patches and upgrades

A full disk image back-up of the Storm production web servers including web applications is taken every 4 weeks. A tape back up regime provides incremental back-up on a daily basis. Regular testing of the back-up and restore process is carried out as part of Storm’s disaster recovery procedures.

Although ideal in many cases this solution is less well suited to very high demand sites or sites which have specialised requirements in terms of performance or resilience.

Dedicated Hosting

Where your site has specific requirements in terms of technology, performance or resilience it is often worthwhile considering a dedicated hosting environment. Storm will work with you to understand your requirements and design an environment to fit your application. We will commission the hardware and configure the services in a hardened build, providing testing and monitoring of the platform as standard. We will then establisge a management and monitoring regime that suits you and ensure that your application integrates pefectly. Storm has commissioned a number of dedicated production web servers for clients and currently host web sites for clients including:

• The Scottish Government
• NHS Scotland
• Health Scotland
• ConocoPhillips
• Lloyds TSB Foundation

Fully managed Hosting

For top level, enterprise hosting with server farms / clustered databases and more interesting network and firewall configurations we believe the best value for our clients is achieved by using one of our tier-1 hosting partners. Having worked with a range of suppliers over the years we are able to make recommendations to you and more often than not we will be on first name terms with the technical resources providing your round the clock solution. We usually work together with hosting providers to provide integrated support and maintenance to the platform and the applications running on it. Working closely together but with clearly delimited responsibilities ensures the highest quality hosting service.