Skip to main content

What we run

Web Hosting Servers VoIP Application Hosting Vibe-Coded Apps
Pricing Why Us Support Contact
All systems operational 0118 384 2175 Get a Quote

Why Us

A hosting company that is also a phone number

We are the hosting arm of a Berkshire IT company that has been fixing things for businesses since 2010. Same office, same engineers, different sign on the door.

Talk to an engineer How support works

The same company

Two names, one office, one set of engineers

Coffee Cup Solutions has been looking after businesses in Berkshire and the surrounding counties since 2010 — the IT support, the networks, the servers, the things that go wrong on a Friday afternoon. Hosting grew out of that, because customers kept asking us to take on the website or the line-of-business application as well, and because we could see how the incumbent host was running it.

Coffee Cup Hosting Services is that work under its own name. Not a subsidiary, not a partner, not a rebadged reseller of somebody else's platform. The same legal entity, the same office in Wokingham, the same engineers and the same phone number.

The separate name exists for a straightforward reason. A lot of hosting customers already have IT people — in-house, or another provider they are perfectly happy with — and have no interest in being sold managed IT support in order to get a server run properly. Making them wade through an IT support website to find the hosting seemed unhelpful, so we stopped doing it.

If you want both, you can have both. If you want one, that is genuinely fine.

What we mean by it

“You can ring us” is an operational claim, not a slogan

Everybody publishes a phone number. The question is what happens after you dial it. Ours rings on the desks of the people who build and run the platform, during working hours, and it is answered by one of them.

There is no script to get through, no requirement to raise a ticket before you are allowed to speak to anyone, and no first line whose job is to establish that you have tried turning it off and on again. If the person answering cannot fix it, the escalation is walking to the next desk rather than opening a case with a vendor and waiting.

The practical effect is that most problems are dealt with on the call, while you are still on it, by someone who already knows how your environment was built — because we built it and wrote it down.

0118 384 2175

From the Coffee Cup service desk

15s
Average call answer time
97%
First-call fix rate
24/7
Monitoring and alerting

These are the figures for the whole service desk, hosting and IT support together. They are the same team, so we see no reason to quote them separately.

Scope

A deliberately short list

Five things. We would rather be genuinely good at a handful of them than list forty and quietly subcontract half.

Everything here is run on infrastructure we manage, by engineers who can open a shell on it. If we cannot support something properly ourselves, we do not sell it.

What is not on the list

No marketplace of one-click add-ons nobody maintains. No unmanaged box handed over with a root password and best wishes. No white-labelled service where our support answer is to raise it with somebody else and wait. The list is short because the things on it are ours to fix.

How we run things

The engineering opinions we actually hold

None of these are clever. Most outages are caused by ignoring one of them.

Boring technology, on purpose

Well-understood components, current versions, conventional configuration. New and interesting is for our own projects. Your production platform gets the thing with fifteen years of documented failure modes.

A backup is only a restore you have tested

Untested backups are a filing habit, not a recovery plan. We restore on a schedule and check the result, so the first time we do it under pressure is never the first time.

Monitoring has to wake somebody up

An alert that lands in an unread mailbox is decoration. Ours go to a rota of people, around the clock, with thresholds tuned so the ones that fire are worth getting up for.

Written down, not remembered

Every environment has build documentation, so whoever answers the phone can see how it was put together. Knowledge that only lives in one engineer’s head is a single point of failure.

No lock-in by design

Standard stacks, your data exportable, no proprietary layer you would have to unpick to leave. We would rather keep you because leaving would be a shame than because it would be difficult.

Saying no is part of the job

If what you are asking for is a bad idea, or the wrong service, or something you do not need to pay us for, we will say so. It costs us the occasional sale and saves everyone the argument later.

Hosting burns electricity. We account for it.

Servers run on power and power has a footprint. Rather than describe ourselves as green and leave it there, Coffee Cup offsets its carbon and funds tree planting, and hosting is included in that as a matter of course. You do not opt in and there is no environmental surcharge on the invoice.

It is not a substitute for using less. We size services to the workload rather than selling headroom nobody touches, consolidate what can be consolidated, and switch off what is not being used — which is better for the footprint and cheaper for you at the same time.

3,575+

Trees planted by Coffee Cup

The offsetting programme runs across the whole company. See what Coffee Cup does.

Honestly

Who we suit, and who we don't

Second list first, if you like. It is quicker to find out here than three months into a contract.

Probably a good fit

  • Businesses where the website or the application earns money, and downtime is measured in lost work rather than lost pride.
  • Organisations with no one in the building who wants to own patching, certificates and backups.
  • Teams with their own developers who want the platform run properly and their deployments left alone.
  • Agencies who would rather not become a hosting company for their own clients.
  • Anyone currently hosted somewhere they can only reach by web form.
  • People who would like to be told when they are about to do something expensive.

Probably not

  • If the deciding factor is the lowest possible monthly figure. Managed hosting has a person in it, and people cost more than disk.
  • If you want to spin infrastructure up and down by API at three in the morning with nobody involved. That is a hyperscaler, and we will say so.
  • If you need global multi-region presence and enormous elastic scale. Our platform is UK-focused and sized for businesses, not for a consumer launch.
  • If you want root access and no process. We can give you access, but not on the understanding that undocumented changes are then our problem.
  • If you are looking for a supplier who says yes to everything. We are not, and it would not be much use to you.
  • If you need day-to-day IT support for staff, laptops and Microsoft 365 — that is the Coffee Cup Solutions side, and it is a separate service.

If you are in the second column, tell us anyway. We will usually know who you should be talking to instead, and pointing you at them costs us nothing.

FAQs

Questions about us

Yes. One legal entity — Coffee Cup Solutions Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 08905462 — trading under two names. Hosting has its own name and its own website because it is bought by different people for different reasons. The office, the engineers and the phone number are shared.

No, and most hosting customers do not. Plenty of them have their own IT team, or their own IT company, and simply want a server run properly by someone who answers the phone. If you do want the wider IT support, it is available from the same company — but it is a separate conversation, not a condition.

An engineer at the Wokingham office. Not an offshore first line reading a decision tree, and not an account manager who has to go and ask. The person who answers has access to your build documentation and, in most cases, worked on it.

In UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, run by a UK-registered company with UK staff. If you need to tell a client or an auditor precisely where their data sits and who can reach it, ask us and we will put it in writing.

You go, and we help. You get your data, your configuration and a sensible cut-over plan, and we will talk to the incoming provider if that makes it quicker. We do not think much of businesses that are retained by how painful leaving would be.

Ask us something awkward

Where the data sits, what happens at 2am, what we would charge, what we would refuse to do. We will give you a straight answer on the phone rather than a brochure.

Start a conversation 0118 384 2175

Or email hello@coffeecupsolutions.com