Managed hosting means that there are no licences, servers or special software to buy; you just need any popular Internet browser. We buy our server space from our partner Rackspace, one of the world’s largest data centre providers and in our opinion, the best.

Your Hosting Environment

As part of every Franchise 360 system all of our customers benefit from:

• Our insistence on the Oracle database; this means class-leading security and reliability as standard.
• High speed network access with multiple redundant internet connections.
• High specification servers that always provide fast and responsive software.
• Top of the range dedicated firewalls protecting your data.
• Availability of the system to a target 99.99% availability during office hours.
• All essential maintenance carried out at convenient times (usually overnight at weekends).
• Nightly backups with a backup history maintained for 2 weeks.
• Our committment to do any work required to restore the system in the event of problems.
• All of the latest hardware and software required to run our applications.

Why we chose this Hosting Environment

In the past, many companies managed their own software and databases. This is an expensive task as it involves buying, setting-up and maintaining complicated hardware and software products.

Many companies are now deciding the use a managed environment such as ours to lower the overall cost of managing their data. The advantages are clear: software companies and data centres have the skills and resources to create an environment that is perfect for modern business software.

By offering our services to many clients, we are able to offer a standard of service that few internal IT departments could compete with and at a fraction of the cost.

We didn’t use “the cloud” because we know that sometimes the service levels, security and data recovery options offered by the cloud fall below that which we demand from our own managed environment. We are monitoring this situation and may well change once we feel this changes.

We chose Rackspace simply because after extensive research, we found them to be the best known, most loved and widely recommended managed hosting providers in the world. Rackspace are one of the more costly hosting providers and rightly so; this is not a time to cut corners.