Cloud & Dedicated Servers

Servers that somebody is actually watching

Virtual or dedicated, Linux or Windows, sized to the workload rather than to a pricing tier — and patched, monitored and backed up by the people you can ring.

Talk to an engineer See what managed means

Two options

Virtual or dedicated

Most businesses need the first. Some genuinely need the second. The difference is worth understanding before anyone quotes you.

Virtual servers

Your own isolated server on shared physical hardware. Resources are reserved to you, and the size can be changed as the workload changes.

Suits

Line-of-business applications and internal tools
Web applications with predictable, moderate traffic
Development, staging and test environments
Anything where you want to start small and grow

Dedicated servers

A physical machine with nothing else on it. More performance per pound at the top end, and a much simpler answer when someone asks who else is on the hardware.

Suits

Database servers with sustained heavy I/O
Workloads with compliance or isolation requirements
Applications licensed per physical core or socket
Consistently high, predictable resource use

Not sure which? Describe the workload and we will tell you which one we would actually recommend, including when the answer is “neither, use our application hosting”.

Managed, specifically

The work that happens whether you notice it or not

“Managed” is a word every host uses. Here is what we mean by it, in the order it tends to matter.

Patching

Operating system and package updates on a defined cycle, with reboots scheduled out of hours and security fixes expedited when severity warrants it.

Monitoring

CPU, memory, disk, service health and application response, checked continuously. Alerts go to an on-call rota, not to an inbox nobody reads at the weekend.

Backups

Off-site, encrypted, with retention agreed up front — and restores tested on a schedule, because an untested backup is a rumour.

Hardening

Firewalling, SSH key authentication, fail2ban, least-privilege service accounts and unnecessary services removed rather than merely disabled.

Capacity

We watch the trend lines and tell you before you run out of disk, not after the application has fallen over on a Sunday.

Access to an engineer

A phone number answered by people who know your environment, and escalation that means walking to the next desk.

Operating systems

What we'll happily run

If it is current and supported by its vendor, we can run it. If it is well past end of life, we will help you get off it.

Linux

Ubuntu LTS, Debian, Rocky and AlmaLinux. The bulk of what we run, and where our automation, monitoring and hardening baselines are most mature.

Windows Server

Current supported releases, including SQL Server, IIS-hosted applications and Remote Desktop Services. Licensing handled as part of the arrangement.

FAQs

Server hosting questions

On a managed server, yes — we do not hold your infrastructure hostage. We do ask that you tell us before making structural changes, because our monitoring and patching assumes a known configuration and we would rather not investigate an alert caused by a change we did not know about.

Managed, in practice. We will sell you an unmanaged box if you genuinely have the in-house capability, but our value is in running the thing — patching, monitoring, backups, hardening and being on the end of the phone. If nobody is doing that, an unmanaged server is a liability with a monthly cost.

Virtual servers can be resized, usually with a short reboot scheduled out of hours. Moving from virtual to dedicated is a migration, which we plan and carry out for you. We would generally rather start you slightly smaller and grow than sell you headroom you never use.

Backups are off-site and separate from the server they protect, with defined retention and restore testing. For workloads that genuinely cannot be down, we will design and price a replicated or failover arrangement — but only where it is warranted, because it costs real money.

Yes. Linux is the majority of what we run, but Windows Server workloads — line-of-business applications, SQL Server, Remote Desktop — are well within scope, including licensing.

Tell us the workload, we'll size it honestly

Send over what you're running — the application, the traffic, the database size — and we'll come back with a specification and a monthly figure, including the bits other quotes leave out.

Get a server quote 0118 384 2175

Or email hello@coffeecupsolutions.com