In order to secure our aim of affordable reliability, Oakhosting.NET works to three key principles:
- Overloading is bad. Overloading is allowing more accounts than a server can support, waging that lots of customers will not use all the space they are allocated. We think this is a bad practice. We don't overload. We never put more customers onto a server unless there's room for every customer to use all of their space. That's why we don't offer “unlimited” storage or bandwidth — You cannot buy hard disks to store unlimited data, so to claim that we could would be no more than a marketing gimmick.
- Affordability is a must. We specialise in supplying web-hosting to churches, charities, individuals and community groups. All of these kinds of customer are looking to get web hosting that can be relied upon, but without paying excessively for it. Keeping our packages affordable is one of our core principles. By offering smaller packages we are able to keep prices down. Lower prices do not mean unreliable hosting, because of our third principle:
- Keep things small. Even hosting companies that don't allow overloading will place many accounts on each shared server. There may be enough space for everyone’s data, but everybody is using the same processors and memory, so that a modern, database-driven site (such as a Wordpress installation) can run slowly. So we keep things small. We use VPS technology, carefully limit the number of accounts on each server, and specify what resources each can use. We are not a giant hosting company that hosts thousands of websites, but a small, lean and personal alternative.
Below is a graph of response times for loading a site over a three-week period (lower response times are good as they signify faster loading pages and a more responsive site). About a third of the way across the graph, the site was moved from a larger shared hosting provider to OakHosting.NET. The result was a much more consistent speed. (Click on the image to enlarge):
