Server Hosting Services & Options

USP has been working with the UK’s leading award winning cloud service provider – Elastic Hosts– for the past 5 years, and we have now migrated all customers and applications to the platform. With multiple centres in the UK, EU, US and elsewhere, the Elastic service provides global coverage for all Unix/windows requirements, with a unique ability to watch and interact with cold boot sequences from power up to login.
The endless versatility of this platform enables us to provide scalable bespoke and complex solutions for serious business applications on dedicated systems, and a wide range of budget priced hosting and storage solutions using shared virtual services.

A key feature of this system is the ability to watch a complete system boot sequence from cold start to login screen.

  • Buy exactly the capacity you need, when you need it, by the hour or by monthly subscription.
  • Run Linux, Windows or any other OS and software
  • US, Netherlands, Canadian, HK, Australia and UK data centres
  • 100% SLA, 100x credits for any downtime
  • Cloud servers ideal for your task
  • Instantly add cloud computing capacity for growth or peaks in demand.
  • Back up & disaster recovery
  • Low cost individual on-demand root servers for prototypes & demos
  • Cloud bursting – wind the cpu and memory capacity up and down in seconds

For serious web systems developers, USP provides various types of managed root servers, in conjunction with one of the smaller and more versatile cloud hosting services. This scheme offers VM servers for Unix and Windows, where the configurations can be scaled from a modest 500MByte RAM/500MHz CPU to 20GByte, 20GHz.

Disk drive space can be resized from 5GByte up, and also cloned. Changing CPU and RAM setup means around 1 minute of downtime on a Unix server. Scaling up the drive will take longer - expanding from 25Gbyte to 100Gbyte takes around 30 minutes. Shrinking drives is not recommended - but we can add a smaller drive temporarily, copy over the contents; test the new configuration, and then delete the original oversized drive.

Yes, you could deal directly with ElasticHosts if you wanted, and you are welcome to check out their site and pricing, but configuring and managing any server from "bare metal" is not for beginners or the faint hearted, so we offer hands-on expertise and experience, and leave you with full access using the WebMin control panel system for managing just about every aspect of the server and its users. Although the default server config we support is Linux Debian 5 with PHP5 and MySql, the platform permits any configuration of Unix components. Windows 2008 is also available; but really now, why would you want to?

Any operating system and software that runs on a 64bit intel platform can be loaded onto this amazingly versatile environment, but non-standard configurations are subject to individual quotation. Additional support is available for I/O intensive disk applciations, and there is a AUP to ensure that "regular" users are not inconvenienced by the experimental.

Hosting

squareShared virtual web server (just FTP access, not with ROOT control!)  from £10 pcm
With 10GB disk allocation, including:
    - 1000MB traffic per month
    - Extra disk space is priced at £30.00pa per 10GB
NB: you can "alias" multiple domains to a virtual server

squareSecure (SSL) virtual web server £30.00 monthly, £150.00 setup
Secure web hosting for encrypted transaction forms, etc. 

Secure server certificates are available from a range of certification authorities from £50-£400 depending on how paranoid you want to be, although they all do pretty much the same thing - visibly enable web communication via encrypted SSL connections.

squareManaged root server from £50.00 monthly, £150.00 setup
USP will set up and manage a server with our cloud partners, Elastic Hosts. Our preferred config is Apache/PHP/MySQL on a 1Gbit backbone; based on Linux platform, Webmin.. including:
    - Static IP addresses £2.50 pcm
    - CPU power £0.012/core-GHz-hour
    - Memory £0.016/GB-hour
    - 25GByte Disk space £10 pcm (can be scaled up to 400GByte)
    - 50GByte FTP space for remote backup
    - Traffic charged at £20/100GByte pcm

squareSchemes can be set up using servers based in the US, Europe and the UK (5 centres)