Most hosting gets set up once, then quietly outlives whoever set it up.
A server gets configured in a hurry to launch something. It works. Years pass. The person who set it up moves on, the documentation was never written, and now nobody is quite sure what would happen if it fell over, only that a good part of the business would stop with it.
That is the usual state of the infrastructure behind business operations software: load-bearing, under-watched and slightly frightening to touch. Done properly, moving to the cloud turns reliability, cost and security into things you can reason about rather than hope about.
When it has to be there
Business operations software is the tooling a company runs on day to day: quoting, surveys, scheduling, reporting. When it is down, work stops and someone is on the phone. The infrastructure underneath it has to assume a data centre will fail one day and carry on anyway.
When the bill should not surprise you
Cloud costs creep when nobody owns them: idle capacity left running, oversized instances, storage nobody remembers filling. We size infrastructure to what it actually does, and tell you when spending more would buy performance you do not need.
01Architecture and provisioning
We design the environment around what the software actually has to do, not a template: compute, database, networking and storage, chosen and sized to fit. It is all defined as code, using CloudFormation, the Serverless Application Model or CDK, so a second environment is a deploy away rather than a fortnight of clicking.
02Reliability and high availability
Workloads spread across availability zones, autoscaling and load balancing where the traffic warrants it, and backups that are tested rather than merely taken. Where the stakes are high we use AWS Backup for recovery across regions and accounts, so a bad day in one place is not a bad day everywhere.
03Security as part of the build
Encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege access rather than a shared key everyone knows, and CloudTrail auditing so there is a record of who did what. Security is part of the architecture from the start, which is a larger subject in its own right.
04Cost management
Right-sizing instead of guessing, reserved capacity where usage is steady, serverless where a workload sits idle most of the day, and a bill you can actually read. We measure before we change anything, and we will tell you when a saving is not worth the complexity it buys.
05Monitoring and support
CloudWatch metrics and alerts, patching and updates kept current, and someone watching who understands the system rather than a dashboard nobody checks. When something needs a human at an awkward hour, that human already knows how your infrastructure fits together.
We still host these, years after we built them.
We are an AWS Select Tier Services Partner and run a Well-Architected review on every engagement, examining reliability, security, cost and operations while the surprises are still cheap to fix. Some of these systems we have hosted since 2013, through years of change to the businesses running on them.
Jaguar Land Rover
The AWS application distributing their tooling and equipment information across more than 40 regions and 13 languages, built and still run by us.
Duwio, for Spacesuit Media
An image-management platform built cloud-native on AWS, with backups across regions and accounts, holding an archive of 600,000 images.
The relationship between us is genuinely a partnership rather than a supplier/customer scenario. They have suggested changes which we would probably never have considered but which have added value.
We review before we build, and we stay after we launch.
- 01
Review
We start with an AWS Well-Architected review, whether you are moving an existing system or building fresh. It examines reliability, security, cost and day-to-day operations, and it is where most of the expensive surprises get found while they are still cheap to fix.
- 02
Build
Infrastructure defined as code, so the environment running in production is the one in version control, not a configuration somebody clicked together and forgot. Autoscaling where load moves around, serverless where traffic is spiky, plain Linux where that is genuinely the right answer.
- 03
Run
We stay on. Someone keeps the operating systems patched, watches the error rates and the bill, and answers the phone when something behaves oddly at seven in the morning. On most of our engagements that is still us, years later.
The things buyers ask us first.
Will we be locked in?
No. It runs in your own AWS account, and you hold a copy of the infrastructure-as-code definitions and the deployment pipeline. We have no interest in holding your systems hostage, and an engagement that only survives because leaving is painful is not one we want.
Can you take over hosting we already have?
Usually, yes. We will review what is there, tell you honestly what state it is in, and give you the options. Moving it rarely means stopping everything for a big-bang cutover; more often it is a staged migration that keeps you running the whole way through.
Does it have to be on AWS?
No, though it usually is. We know AWS deeply enough to make it cheap and boring, and that is worth more to you than a stack we would be learning at your expense.
Who actually runs it day to day?
The two founders, and the trusted collaborators we bring in around them. There is no account manager between you and the people who built your infrastructure, and no junior quietly learning on your production systems.