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Hosted Servers

Date: Jul 22 2024
Hosted Servers

Albacore have just completed a significant infrastructure upgrade to our hosted server platform so there’s never been a better time to migrate your business!
Customers seeking greater stability from their declaration and forwarding software from any Internet connected device are choosing Albacore’s hosted servers because they offer lower capital costs as well as fixed ongoing costs. This is combined with market leading functionality, security and support from the Albacore team. All of the licensing, power and bandwidth costs are included in the ongoing costs for the solution.
Albacore also provide and manage any CSP connectivity that is required on hosted servers to provide seamless access to HMRC CDS.
The design of our solution means that all aspects of customer virtual machines exist at a virtual level within the solution, above the level of a single server hardware instance – that’s in terms of their storage, memory, processing and network. These customer virtual machines are therefore able to tolerate a failure of 1 physical server within the collection of multiple physical servers that provide the overall solution.
Our platform currently provides solutions for more than 70 businesses and serves well over 850 users, ranging from micro businesses to corporate clients. The platform utilises Hewlett Packard Enterprise server hardware configured with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.
Purchased outright by Albacore, the platform has been significantly expanded in 2024 to ensure the resource can scale with customer requirements. The server hardware has been specified from component level by our team to offer best of breed resilience and performance.
Each customer virtual machine on the platform benefits from our management agent. This software provides pro-active monitoring and alerting to Albacore engineers as well as detecting and resolving issues on customer servers using automation. The management agent also controls the delivery of Microsoft security updates. These are individually approved by our team before rollout to customer servers to minimise the likelihood of an update effecting the functionality of customer systems.
Having a resilient hosted server setup is excellent but it’s far from the whole picture. Reliable backups are of utmost importance, so our hosted servers also include onsite and offsite backup routines. We take highly granular onsite backups of each server every day using Veeam software. The data on customer hosted servers is also backed up offsite to cloud based storage to maintain offsite versions of the data. All backup routines are monitored by our engineers with actions taken to ensure their success. We can also offer Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions, offering a maximum 4 hour failover to alternate hardware at a separate location in Albacore’s sole control if customers chose this option as part of their hosted server solution.
The hardware that provides hosted servers to our customers is located within a Tier III datacentre. The datacentre is located about 15 miles from our office, about 20 minutes up the motorway from our HQ if we need to visit. The location is ISO27001 certified. The site has blast proof windows, specialist security doors and biometrical access control. Access is by appointment only with full audit logs, and continuous video surveillance with motion sensitivity is in place with 12 months of CCTV history available. Power to the facility is fed from 2 separate substations on independent rings on the national grid, and in addition the facility offers redundant UPS systems providing 20 minutes of battery at full load. These UPS systems are backed up by redundant generator protection with 10 days of fuel stored on site.
Internet connectivity to the facility is unrivalled on the south coast, being fed redundantly from 2 separate exchanges and via 4 ISP’s. We have a dedicated 1Gbps Internet connection assigned to our servers, with ample opportunity to scale up as required.
Security is at the core of our hosted server offerings. All Internet browsing that takes place on customer hosted servers is filtered by a constantly updated globally aware service. We operate tight change management policies and work pro-actively to ensure all aspects of the hardware and software of the solution are updated and secure at all times.
Although we set up secure passwords for all users by default, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is quickly becoming an industry standard so this is quoted in all new solutions. It’s the biggest single improvement that our customers can make to improve their security stance.
Albacore’s key asset is the quality of support our customers receive via our Southampton based helpdesk. We offer unlimited telephone and remote support from our team of 15 skilled engineers, backed up by administration and management staff.
The comprehensive knowledge and understanding of both the IT and Freight industries that only Albacore can bring to the solutions we deliver for our customers is why our customers choose us and stay with us. We will continue to invest in hardware and facilities as well as in people and utilities to provide our customers of all sizes with best of breed hosted server solutions.

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