Hosting Service Manual

You can pair any hosting service with any of our DR options. Please refer to your contract or managed service agreement for the level that applies.

DR Options

We offer the following DR packages. Note that these are the maximum times we set for responding to a disaster and will always work to restore services as quickly as possible.

Timescales and Objectives

RTO - Recovery Time Objective. This is the maximum length of time it will take to restore the service.

RPO - Recovery Point Objective. The maximum age of the data that will be restored (ie, how frequently the service is backed-up).

Basic

The basic package is available to all of our hosting offerings. It uses a nightly backup which will be manually restored by one of our engineers. We do not offer a guaranteed RTO as other DR options will take priority.

Standard

As with the Basic option, services are recovered from the previous night's backup. As well as guaranteeing an RTO, this option runs a daily "verify" job which restores the backup to a dynamically generated environment, and performs automated tests of the restored services before closing down.

Corporate and Premium

These options offer different levels of replication to a dedicated DR environment. Unlike Basic and Standard, where the restored services are taken from the nightly backup, these options allow you to assess the level of recovery your services need and pick a suitable RTO and RPO.

Always On

As well as enhanced RTO and RPO, Always On allows you to access a read-only version of your DR hosting environment on request. This option offers the most robust defence against any disaster.

In the Event of a Disaster

Should DR services need to be invoked our support and hosting teams will keep you informed throughout the process and work to exceed our guaranteed objectives. To successfully resolve a disaster situation, additional input will be required from you or your network teams.

DNS

We do not manage your DNS. In the event of a disaster we will provide you with the new IP addresses of your various environments. It will be up to you to update your DNS records to point to the DR infrastructure.

We highly recommend you familiarise yourself with how and by whom your DNS is managed.

Email

Depending on the situation, moving to a DR environment may mean a change of mail servers. This could mean that the addresses used to send email from your environments need to go through an address or domain verification process, as described in Verifying Sender Email Addresses.