Hosting and support

Flexible, fully professional hosting and support

Your access to Semantico’s knowledge and expertise needn’t end when you sign off on a project. Semantico offers a range of flexible, ongoing support packages to help maintain your resource in prime condition.

Whether it’s single-server hosting with minimal monitoring you require, or a facility with multi-machine clusters under constant supervision, we can tailor a hosting and support package to your needs. With a fully scalable range of options to draw on, we’ll build a package that suits your platform, your staff, your users and of course your budget.
Our Hosting and Application and Systems Management services combine to keep your site running as quickly and efficiently as possible, maximising access and performance for your users.

We would urge you to have Semantico both host and manage your site, for the following practical reasons:

  • We don’t have to negotiate solutions with third parties, speeding up the process of implementation and giving full accountability
  • There are no unknowns in the process
  • We provide a focus on the uptime of your site that internal IT departments facing competing priorities would find difficult to match

Our hosting service is designed with online publishing projects specifically in mind. We focus on the features that publishers need:

  • Backup files
  • High availability
  • Load balancing
  • High network speeds
  • Capacity for expansion
  • Our dual datacentre architecture also allows for many disaster recovery options

Nevertheless, we recognise that many customers will already have a preferred hosting provider, or a large internal investment in hosting, and of course we can provide Application and Systems Management for sites hosted elsewhere.

To discuss the hosting and support options that are right for your project call Semantico on + 44 1273 722 222 or e-mail us.

Hosting

Semantico offers a dual-datacentre hosting service that can be tailored according to your needs. We can provide recommendations on the hardware you’ll need to run your site and we’ll install your choice of system into one of our secure hosting environments. We will work closely with you to ensure the optimum balance between availability and cost – whatever your requirements.

The Bunker

Housed in a former NATO nuclear bunker in Kent, The Bunker offers a solid and stable infrastructure to provide you with highly available site and server operation. Our selection of this as our chosen primary datacentre was highly influenced by the security of the site – all site access is escorted – and the availability of skilled technical staff, 24/7. No other datacentre provides this level of service.

In co-operation with the Bunker’s technical team, we have designed full High Availability architecture at this site, so that we’re able to offer solutions to our clients that require a 99.95% availability level – including site maintenance. This architecture includes:

Zeus Load Balancer Cluster

To enable horizontal scaling of your applications, Semantico run the enterprise-grade Zeus traffic management system. This system also allows us to automatically detect and correct system failure by transparently switching traffic away from busy or unresponsive application servers. By providing this traffic management capability within our shared infrastructure we’re able to reduce the often unfeasible implementation costs of such a system to a level that you can afford.

Multi-homed Internet bandwidth

We maintain multiple (currently four) relationships with tier-1 network providers, to ensure that any internet routing dispute or network outage will not affect the availability of your applications. We automatically balance traffic between our network providers to ensure high availability of bandwidth at all times.

Disaster Recovery Site

Whilst the Bunker site offers a high level of availability, you may also need an off-site copy of your site or data. We can provide many options in this regard, often at extremely competitive prices, utilising our own Brighton datacentre.

Backup

Essential for all your sites, we of course offer many different backup options. The range of backup options include online-onsite, online-offsite, offline-offsite – all depending on your needs.

The Brighton Data Centre

Semantico’s own datacentre environment in Brighton is the Internet POP for SSE Telecoms in the South-East region of the UK. In effect, we have a tier-1 carrier grade datacentre in our office.
As such, we can offer an economical, secure hosting environment with immediate access to all of Semantico’s development and support expertise. This datacentre is designed for:

  • Live sites where up to 99% uptime guarantees are sufficient
  • Pre-live hosting
  • Test system hosting
  • Disaster recovery site hosting
  • Online backup hosting
  • Non-critical system hosting

Both our datacentres offer features essential to production grade site operation:

  • Redundant UPS systems
  • Cisco firewall clusters
  • N+1 redundant core networking
  • Ample tier-1 bandwidth

Our hosting is available as a stand-alone service for projects developed outside Semantico. Publishers who are hosting new projects with us can choose to have other sites hosted with Semantico to keep them all with one expert hosting provider.
Our Brighton Datacentre is particularly useful for local companies looking to make use of our expertise for a variety of different websites.

Application and Systems Management

Once your site is live, our Application and Systems Management service provides ongoing support for your online publishing solution.
We will constantly monitor your website to ensure that it is working as efficiently as possible, all the time. No other managed hosting service can know as much about your application as we do, being the developers who created it. We can anticipate issues and implement solutions before they become serious, and provide options to ease the stresses on your systems.
Our complete Application and Systems Management Service comprises the following:

  • Service Monitoring
  • Application availability and performance
  • System and database performance
  • System and application log monitoring
  • Continual service improvement of monitoring systems
  • Performance Reports
  • Capacity – how much traffic is your system handling, and how much more can it handle?
  • Identification of potential resource bottlenecks and constraints in core resources: CPU, Bandwidth, Disk, Memory
  • Slow HTTP requests, slow database query analysis
  • Maintenance deployments

We will periodically deploy bug fix releases to your test and production application clusters as available, and naturally will ensure any emergency releases are installed immediately.

Test System Management

We maintain an equivalent test system to your production cluster in our virtualised test infrastructure, to ensure that any change – small or large – is tested prior to live deployment. We use the Puppet open source configuration management framework to ensure that any change is made in a consistent manner through this process.

Operating System Updates

To keep your system running securely and reliably, we will update the system as required to patch any significant bugs or security errata. Our test system gives you the confidence that these upgrades are tested beforehand.

DNS Management

We will either work with your DNS vendor to ensure records are correct and served effectively, or we’ll take full responsibility for the hosting and management of your application DNS. Whichever works best for you.

Subsystem Management

Your application and system will depend on third-party subsystems – databases, application servers, etc. We are experts in managing and monitoring these subsystems. Here are some examples of subsystems we currently manage and monitor:

  • Apache HTTPD and Tomcat
  • PostgreSQL and MySQL
  • eXist
  • MarkLogic
  • Solr and Lucene search engines
  • SMTP and IMAP mail systems
  • Shibboleth
  • Hadoop
  • Adobe Livecycle