Features | SirsteveHQ CP | cPanel |
---|---|---|
Number of accounts | Unlimited | Restricted by the server’s hardware |
Native support for AWS and Google Cloud | ||
Disk space | Unlimited | Restricted by the server’s hardware |
Bandwidth | Unlimited | Restricted by the server’s hardware |
Autoscaling cloud platform | ||
Redundant web servers | ||
Built-in replication & failover | ||
Global CDN | ||
Website Acceleration Suite | ||
Anti-DDoS protection | ||
Built-in Web Application Firewall | ||
Isolated web, MySQL, FTP, control panel and storage | ||
E-mail kept securely away from website storage | ||
WordPress optimised | ||
WordPress staging | ||
Google DNS | ||
Single login to manage hosting in the UK and USA | ||
Pre-populated white label support database |
All our web hosting services use SirsteveHQ’s proprietary autoscaling technology. No other company has access to this.
Autoscaling literally means that our resources scale automatically. Bandwidth, memory and processing power is scaled up or down instantly – depending on demand. This is what makes them true ‘elastic cloud’. If there’s a surge in traffic, your website will continue to offer the same fast experience for every user.
This is because a site isn’t hosted on one or two servers. Instead, it can access the whole platform’s resources: multiple servers. It’s what makes the SirsteveHQ platform special.
If there’s a spike in demand and your shared hosting ‘neighbours’ become busy, it doesn’t affect your site speed. Busy sites are isolated from others.
This doesn’t happen at other hosting providers, as websites controlled by cPanel are restricted to single servers. With other hosts, if you share a server with a busy site, it will affect your site too.
To remain the provider of the fastest shared hosting, it’s important that we use the latest technologies. So we investigate all the speed-boosting technologies available to other web hosting companies.
The problem with these ‘off the shelf’ products is that they don’t scale very well. They’re designed for small companies that use older, single-server technologies. To work with our autoscaling, we found that the better option was to write our own web hosting code.
Our developers have customised PHP-FPM and OPcache to ensure that your website gets the resources it needs, even if it’s really busy. Our code boosts performance for every website running PHP 5.6 or above. For more recent versions of PHP, the speed improvements are even more pronounced. As we’re not constrained by CloudLinux, we don’t have to impose limits on cores, memory, bandwidth and processes.
Your site stays fast, however busy it gets.
Load balancing is about sharing traffic across servers. Other web hosts use load balancing – but not the kind we’ve developed. Their load balancing mitigates failover: if a server goes down, your site will be moved to another, so it stays online.
It’s a kind of disaster recovery. That’s expected: we offer that kind of server redundancy as well, even though we use some of the best hardware in the industry – thanks to our long-term partners at Dell – and a robust 10 Gb network.
But SirsteveHQ load balancing is of a different calibre.
Our global load balancing makes use of monitors that will respond to traffic load and balance it across multiple servers when needed. Many other providers don’t offer this. The consequence for you is this: with SirsteveHQ, your site stays online, and remains fast, whatever load the servers are under.
The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names – and email addresses – into IP addresses. So when you visit a URL, your browser knows the address of the server to download the page from. It’s an essential part of the internet – so it needs to be fast.
Google knows all about fast internet response times – as you’d expect! Their global fibre network leads the industry. It provides a quick and stable response regardless of traffic. So we built our DNS platform on the same infrastructure as Google.
All domains hosted with us benefit from Google DNS. SirsteveHQ Resellers can take advantage of our white-label Virtual Name Servers and offer this rock solid, cutting edge DNS solution under their own brand.
Many hosting companies don’t invest in SSD storage, or if they do, they use the cheapest available hardware. It’s so they can keep ‘sticker-prices’ as low as possible. That’s not the case with us: we use Samsung Enterprise SSDs in our storage arrays.
Each Dell web server has two Intel Xeon Scalable 12-core processors with hyper-threading. This gives 48 logical cores per machine. These have access to plenty of fast memory: 64 GB 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM. Any of our web servers can serve any website we host at any time.
We bake-in security to every layer of our web hosting. Our storage is resilient to the level that – in a worst-case scenario – whole storage servers and disks can fail with no downtime. We take daily backups off-site for extra protection. But that’s not all – read more about our secure hosting.
All websites and VPS are hosted in secure, state-of-the-art data centres based in the UK or USA. They’re manned 24/7 and include high-level physical security measures. These cover everything from backup power generators to advanced fire protection.
Our hosting platform is built for the future. We support IPv6, which is the new standard for IP addresses. Our servers use HTTP/2 – a major revision of the HTTP network protocol – as standard. HTTP/2 means that browsers can request and receive more data than before. It results in faster loading websites and happier users.
All our technical support staff have ample industry experience, having worked with our directors for many years. If you have a really thorny issue, they have direct access to our developers in the same building. They’re available 24/7 through instant live chat and our email ticketing system.
They both have the same effect: your website loads faster. However, they work in different ways. Autoscaling ensures that when your website gets busy, it has access to as much resource as it needs, so it doesn’t slow down. A single site can take advantage of a whole server or many servers.
Load balancing stops other busy websites on our shared platform having an effect on yours. It balances the traffic load between multiple servers. It also works as a safety measure: if in the unlikely event of a server failure, it can ensure that your site stays online.
Your website will be hosted in one of our origin data centres in Reading, UK or Dallas, USA.
Your email is hosted on separate servers to the website, so that any problems or unexpected load from email doesn’t affect the performance of your site.