Our clients often ask whether they should host with Flow, or host directly with one of the major hosting providers – Hetzner, Afrihost or Rackspace. So why host with us?
Hosting is more about the service than the hardware
When you pay for a hosting company, what you are paying for is the team behind the hosting service to manage your hardware and upgrade and protect your software. The hardware itself is the smallest piece of the pie. With Flow you get a hosting team of real people who have real names – not a call centre.
Forget the finger-pointing
When your site goes down, who do you call? Sometimes it has to do with the hosting provider and sometimes it’s the website provider. We cut out this confusion by giving you only one place to call. Our team understands both your website and your hosting environment, enabling us to quickly get to the root of the problem. But you’re unlikely to ever make that call, since our uptime is around the 99.9% level across all of our sites.
Hosting is more about the website or web app, than about the underlying server
It doesn’t matter how fast your server is, if your website is not optimised it is not likely to perform very quickly. Flow’s servers are optimised for the content management systems and bespoke web applications that we build.
Hosting is continually evolving, and research and development is expensive
Some of the cheapest hosts have stuck with technology that was around 10 or even 20 years ago. Due to our wide range of clients and the cutting-edge websites we build, we have invested heavily in new hosting technologies, including virtualisation and containerisation technologies, robust deployment methods and in-depth reporting tools. Flow currently hosts 120 websites.
Full access
Our team builds their own servers from the ground up, instead of using a hosting provider’s control panel. This enables us to monitor every layer of the technology stack and to quickly find the answers we require. “We don’t do that” is not in our lexicon (except perhaps when it comes to outdated, insecure technologies).
Great hardware
We rent our servers and rack space from Hetzner. Hetzner is South Africa’s leading hosting company responsible for hosting more than 30% of South African websites. Our servers are top of the line with features such as dual power supply and mirrored hard drives to ensure that no data is ever lost and that even if there is a power failure, your server keeps running.
Monitoring 24 hours a day
We know when your website is inaccessible before you do. We run 24-hour monitoring on all of our websites and we’re alerted as soon as a website goes offline, for whatever reason.
Experience with high-volume traffic
Flow has run websites that have had over one-million visits in a single day, without any downtime. When your website suddenly becomes an internet sensation, we say “bring it on”. We use advanced caching tools such as Varnish and CloudFlare to take on large traffic volumes.
We ‘eat our own dogfood’
This is a common expression in programming – 'dogfooding' is using the technology you build for others. We run our website on the same servers on which we run yours. Secondly, the same team responsible for building the site is responsible for keeping it online. This encourages robust development and design practices, because no developer wants to be woken up at 2am to fix their website (take it from me!)