British Web Hosting
2020Media’s hosting service has been 100% British since 1999, when the company was founded. We took the decision early on that we didn’t want to outsource our most important assets – our staff – to far away territories. That’s why our team are all based right here in London. We’re close to our customers, we’re close to our network, and we’re close to the market we serve.
Made in Britain – UK Fast
For websites with a mainly British audience, you get a faster response from a UK network. Although the difference is slight (the speed of light comes into the equation!), when a browser can make up to a hundred requests to load a single web page, the small differences do add up. 2020Media’s network is centred in London’s Telehouse datacentre and is linked by multiple fast connections to UK backbone providers.
Choose a British Host
One of the hardest choices you’ll have is who to use for hosting of your lovely new website. Whilst there are certain hosts that you should avoid at all costs (see ‘unlimited hosting’), professional websites are advised to skip the generic, hyper-market style hosts and look for a specialised UK host instead. We look at some of the factors worth exploring before signing up on our blog, but one of the key things to check out is the support. Horror stories abound of customers who’ve been completely cut off by their host and it’s important to speak to the host’s customer service team (not just the salesman). British customers should ask: Are they local? Do they speak your language fluently? Can they provide support during the hours that suit you?
About 2020Media
2020Media is proud to be a British company and uphold the finest traditions of British customer service. All our customer service team are native English speakers and are available 24/7. Our London web hosting has a track record of excellent third-party verified Uptime.
We believe British web hosting can’t be beaten for service and value!
Choose British Hosting
What are the reasons to choose a British hosting provider? Are there any benefits from selecting a UK host rather than one from another country?
This section explores the UK web service provider sector and what businesses and consumers can gain from hosting in Britain.
Hosting and Internet services can now be purchased from around the globe, and many overseas providers will show prices in Pounds Sterling (they snoop your IP number when you visit their site), and even display a British phone number.
But that doesn’t mean criteria to choose a good web host have shifted. Far from it. The usual things like customer support, resources you will get, reliability and uptime, and location of the web host all play a part.
Larger web hosts are constantly merging and splitting, so what has been a good local service in the past may no longer be the case – when is the last time you spoke to someone at your hosting company? Has everything changed? Is the guy who you used to recognise long been put out to pasture in favour of a cheap overseas call centre where time spent on the phone with customers is measured to the second?
Buy British
There are benefits to having your website or service physically hosting in the UK. All our hosting, staff, servers, network and billing is done right here in London, UK.
If you host a website with us, or take out a virtual server or dedicated server account then we provide British IP numbers.
Why British or UK hosting?
Search engines want to show pages in the UK to UK users. They want their search results to be sites that load quickly, so that users don’t abandon the site and go elsewhere. Therefore, it’s important to have a hosting provider with close proximity to your target audience, preferable located in the same country. With a British web host your website will be a relevant, local site to your UK audience.
Rest of the World
We do not neglect the rest of the world either. Our multi-homed, BGP powered network connects to multiple upstream providers over fast redundant links since 2002. Our network is based in Telehouse, the hub of the internet in the UK and Europe. As home to the LINX and LONAP most of the UK internet traffic passes through Telehouse – also home to 2020Media’s network.
Our Uptime is “3 nines”
Don’t take our word for it, we happily provide links to third-party independent uptime monitoring services.
- webhostingstuff.com – webhostingstuff.com has been monitoring us since 2008!
- montools.com – no outages detected in the last year.
At 99.98% overall uptime, 2020Media’s uptime is considered excellent.
But don’t all hosts have downtime?
Yes it’s true, all hosts have times when they need to take a system offline for scheduled maintenance. If our scheduled maintenance periods were excluded from the testing our public results would show even better performance. For example webhostingstuff.com noted 38 mins downtime in December 2016. This outage of our primary website www.2020media.com was actually a period of planned maintenance for a complete physical move of servers from one datacentre to another.
But we believe third party data is the only data that 100% trustworthy so we’re happy to link to their data to all prospective and existing customers.
In actual fact, since we joined RIPE* in 2002, our network has never been down – that’s thanks to our system of multi-homing of network and redundant routing.
That’s over 12 years network uptime at 100%.
* What is RIPE::The Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre is the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. It oversees the alllocation of IP Addresses to it’s members