Hosting Services

What is a 'Hosted Server'?

A hosted server is an off-site/remote server managed and maintained by a qualified IT provider. Your programs and data are safely accessed over the internet rather than being installed on your own computers. The server is secure, backed up and accessed via Remote Desktop Connection. You don't need to install business programs on every computer used in your business as you just connect to the hosted server and work there. A hosted server can remove the need for an office based server as well as giving you the flexibility and convenience of being able to work in any location that has internet access, be that at home, in the office or while your away.

Since computers became the main way to work, many businesses install software and save data on a server in the office. Staff have the programs they need installed on their own work computers and open the company data in those programs over the office network. However many companies are now moving to hosted servers for the one or more of the benefits they offer.

Key benefits of using a hosted server

BENEFIT
Scalability	Hosted servers are customisable and scalable enough to fulfil the growing requirements of any business. You can add/remove users/access when you need to.
Off-site backup	Your data is securely backed-up and away from your premises.You also have the option to back up data locally if you'd like a copy with you.
Work from anywhere	Work on live data from any location, no need to synchronise data sets.
Flexible with work hours	Hosted servers increase accessibility to information with 24 hour functioning. Users don't need to be bound to office hours to access their programs and data, they can work whenever they want.

How do I access my programs?

Once the hosted server is setup, you can access it using any of the following devices:

• Windows PCs or Laptops
• Apple MACs/Airbooks (using the free Microsoft Remote Desktop from the MAC App Store)
• Chromebooks (using the free Chrome Remote Desktop App)
• Android tablets/phones**
• Apple tablets/phones**
• Windows tablets/phones**

* These devices are only suitable if you needed to make an important/urgent change, they are not suitable for normal working practice.

Security / Looking After Your Data

When having your software and data hosted outside your premises, you need reassurance that your hosting provider has the right level of security and data protection so that in the most extreme eventuality, your data is not at risk and you maintain access to it.

Your data is in safe hands:

• We use UK (Manchester) sited servers behind managed firewalls which scan all traffic.
• We use industry standard “VEEAM” for backing up the servers
• We can restore the entire VM (Virtual Machine) back to its original host, which will overwrite the existing one, affectively rolling it back to the day the chosen restore point was taken.
• We can restore the entire VM as above but onto a different host, which would leave the original copy intact A restore of the one of more the files that make up the virtual machine can be restored to a folder We can restore files from the virtual machine itself, e.g. if someone deleted a file from the C drive of the VM we can restore just that file.
• Servers are backed up every night with a 30 day backup retention
• Take local backups of your Sage (or other program) data whenever you wish.
• The Data Centre is highly protected with the Fortigate UTM device. This solution provides multi-level, unified threat management (UTM) capabilities against malware attacks.
• Windows Updates - we can ensure all updates are installed when required. We try to minimise how often this is done as most updates require reboots and this would affect the availability of the servers.
• As standard we do not install anti-virus software on our servers but this can be provided or the customer can install their own.