Why Us?
We’ve talked to our customers and staff and between us have come up with 15 reasons why we would choose EtherClear over our competitors.
Industry Leading Pro-Active Server Management
We provide management with all of our servers, which we feel includes features that are critical to providing the level of support you expect and that we hope to provide. This includes pro-active monitoring, operating system updates using Ksplice, monthly server maintenance and cPanel control panel for you to use to make your end of the management easier.
Pro-Active 24/7 Monitoring
Some hosts cannot offer great uptime as they have no way to tell when their servers are down. We use 24 hour monitoring that alerts on call staff to any issues, including high server loads and RAM use that may crash the server, so they can work immediately to fix it. This allows us to keep downtime to a minimum, and even prevent problems before they happen.
Only ‘Server Grade’ Hardware
We’re proud to be an Intel partner, and to use only server grade parts to build every one of our servers. These are parts, such as RAM and motherboards, that have been more extensively tested and are more reliable than the parts you’d get in your home computer. So you can rest assured that your site is on a well-built, reliable server.
cPanel Control Panel as Standard
Similar to what you get on a shared hosting package elsewhere, we include cPanel, the number one choice of control panel for web hosting, with all our services. cPanel gives you everything you need to manage your website, from email and webmail to database management; you can do it all via cPanel!
Commitment to new Technologies and Software
Unlike many providers, we now offer LiteSpeed: a high-performance, high-scalability web server. LiteSpeed doubles your server capacity and is 6 times faster than the standard Apache web server, as it processes higher loads at higher speeds! We think you deserve the best for your website, and all packages now offer LiteSpeed as standard, so all your websites will load much quicker.
Commitment to server Uptime with Ksplice
We use Ksplice, which allows us to update the server software without having to reboot it. This means you can have the most up to date system, without the lack of uptime, so your site is always running at tip top standards.
Nightly off server backups, as Standard
Although we highly recommend you still take your own backups of your website data, unlike other hosts we perform nightly backups to an off server location of every file on our servers, so that we can try to restore your site as it was that night, if the server fails during the day. But we’ll say it again and again, you should have your own up to date backups just in case, and every time you edit your site, backup, backup again, and backup somewhere else! You can never be too safe with your website data.
High Specification Datacenters with Great Reputations
BlueSquare are well experienced and even better equipped with 24/7 security – 6-layer swipecard entries 24/7 – non stop power with their own generators that power-up with any power-outages from the grid, and a 20Gbit Ethernet ring, so you’re always connected at very high speeds and self-healing capacity. Find out more by reading about our Infrastructure.
All our UK services are Carbon Neutral.
Our Maidenhead datacenter, BlueSquare, is carbon neutral and, as such, anything we host there is carbon offset on our behalf.
Plus if you’re on a virtual server, you’re helping even more, as one of our VPS host systems pulls around 1 amp of power and can host up to virtual 24 servers. Whereas 24 traditional servers would use about 24 amps!
Server Status Blog
Our off network service status site – http://status.etherclear-group.co.uk/ allows you to check if we are having any technical problems, even if our main website is offline! We write details here of any downtime issues, so you always know what’s happening and how long it will be a problem (if we know). We also tweet any problems we are having that are affecting services, just follow@etherclearMH on twitter and stay in the loop.
99.5% Uptime Guarantee
We have a guaranteed uptime of 99.5% on all of our servers. This means your website will be up no matter what package you have. We believe every customer deserves the highest uptime possible, regardless of what’s on the invoice.
All our support is provided by UK staff
All of our support staff live and work in the UK, so when you need help with your website or your hosting, you can talk to one of our direct employees, not a support team that is outsourced from elsewhere. Our staff care about the success of your business and your website, so we’re here in the UK to help whenever you need us.
Month to Month billing, with Flexibill
Unlike many managed hosting providers that require large upfront commitments for a year or more, with most of our services we offer month to month payment terms without minimum contract lengths, so you can use our services for as long as it suits your business, not as long as we want you to.
Highly Competitive Pricing
All of our great services come with an attractive price tag to match, so you get the great, personal service for a significantly lower price than many much larger managed hosting company. Don’t believe us? If you can find a cheaper quote for an identical service – and you can prove it – we’ll match it.
Incredible Affiliate Scheme
We have a great programme here for referrals. Unlike many affilate schemes our partner program pays out continuously over 6 months! When you refer a client to EtherClear we will pay you up to 50% of their first payment plus up to 20% of their monthly payments for the next 6 months, so long as they remain an EtherClear customer for that time. More details on this can be found here.