UK Dedicated Tour

Since WDL first built websites in 2002, we have always offered a web hosting service. Solid, secure and fast web hosting is vitally important for the success of a website. Poor web hosting can have a negative effect on search engine rankings, as well as user experience, resulting in an underperforming website. We encourage our clients to host with us because it means we can ensure that appropriate web hosting is employed, and gives us the necessary control to effect changes quickly and efficiently if there are problems.

There are numerous routes for us to choose for hosting our client’s websites. Having balanced up the options, we decided to invest in our own dedicated servers, which we’d then allocate to clients as a shared environment. To achieve this, we needed a partner to provide those servers in a suitable data centre. When it came to choosing this partner, having assessed many, we chose a small company, UK Dedicated. Their size was important to us, as it meant that they truly cared about performance and customer service. They haven’t let us down.

Clients often ask where their websites are hosted, and the answer, surprising many, is Hemel Hempstead. Centro 3 is a state of the art data centre run by Gyron, and alongside our dedicated servers, it provides a home to some big household names, including Spotify, Verisign, Adobe and Symantec.

Despite enjoying many years of excellent service from UK Dedicated, we had never visited the data centre before, so when the opportunity arose, we jumped at the chance. Bob, Jeff and I, armed with our passports, took the short trip round the M25 to Hemel Hempstead last week, and this blog tells you what we found.

Centro 3 is an unassuming building on an industrial estate. There are no signs, and if you didn’t know, it would be a safe guess to say that it was an office. The only suggestion that it’s something more exciting is the imposing perimeter fence with dangerous looking rota spikes, the anti-ram raid barriers, blast-proof windows and impregnable looking steel doors. Entering the building is done via intercom, and a secondary door will not open until the first is closed.

Once inside the building you report to reception, where a security guard sits for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (presumably on shifts) behind glass that appears to be inches thick. Passports are passed over, and after a few minutes of unknown checks, guest passes are returned. The passports stay with the guard until we’re ready to leave.

The only access to the rest of the data centre floor is via a small man-trap. One person at a time enters the man-trap by scanning their passes and is isolated until security allows them to proceed. Regular staff are identified via a biometric iris scanner, all very James Bond. Visitors are allowed to proceed manually by security, presumably as their visitor pass is cross-referenced via remote camera with their passports. Once security clearance is achieved, a door on the other side of the man-trap opens, and you progress to the other side. A sticky floor removes dust from your shoes, a timely reminder that dirt and debris are not welcome inside a server.

Our first glimpse of hi-tec equipment came in the maintenance corridor. Here, the power units and air conditioning is housed. This is deliberately kept separate from the server rooms so that maintenance staff are kept away from the sensitive IT equipment. The power units, we are told, provide enough redundancy to ensure that failure will not interrupt service. The corridor also houses what appears to be the worlds largest fire extinguisher. On questioning, our guide tells us that in the event of a fire, the cylinder will release a large volume of gas into the server room, lowering the oxygen level to a point where flames are extinguished. The server room must be an uncomfortable place to find oneself when it is released. Our guide assures us that the gas has never been released, which is a good thing, as it costs £15,000 to refill.