What about reliability?

Reliability is incredibly important for you and it's just as important for us. We need to be online 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

No service provider can guarantee they'll be up and running 100% of the time ? but we aim for "5 nines" availability - that's 99.999% of the time or just 5 minutes downtime per year.

We've achieved this industry-leading figure for the last 5 years.

Our infrastructure has been carefully set up to help us to achieve the 5 nines. Here's what we've got:

We host our data in the United Kingdom from two separate data centers. Our primary data center handles about 70% of our traffic under normal conditions. It includes multiple, load balanced servers so we can upgrade servers one at a time without any service interruptions.

The primary center has multiple, redundant and diverse connections to the web. That means that they use different companies to route their traffic and the cables actually leave the building at difference places so an excavator outside can't cut the cord!

Our secondary data center is located with our administrative center. It handles about 30% of the traffic under normal conditions and, like the primary center, uses load balanced servers.

If a server fails in a data center, the others automatically take the load without any service interruption. If a data center loses its web connection, other connections automatically take the strain. And if there's a catastrophic failure in one data center, all the traffic is automatically rerouted to the other.