Hosting UK, a St Asaph-based company with clients worldwide, will use the facility to reduce its reliance on expensive server space in Manchester and London while expanding its range of services.
Running costs for its North Wales data centre are little more than a third of its English city equivalents, enabling the company to recoup its investment in just one year.
Itself a registered FibreSpeed Service Provider, Hosting UK is already looking for new premises for a second facility in North Wales.
Hosting UK’s new data centre has a dedicated 1 Gigabit connection to the FibreSpeed fibre-optic network, linking the operation with the company’s network in Manchester and London where it takes in multiple high speed connections to the rest of the Internet.
Managing Director Phil Parry revealed that without FibreSpeed, his company would have been forced to leave North Wales in order to grow.
“I’d been looking at relocating to Manchester or Liverpool, even Chester, because we simply couldn’t get the network bandwidth we needed here,” he said.
“When I heard about FibreSpeed I decided to wait. The network gave us the bandwidth we needed at an affordable price, so it made the data centre possible.
“The cost of running data centres has been rising and rising. I knew the cost of operating one here would be lower. In fact they’re about 65 per cent what they are in Manchester and London, so it was a great decision to make.”
The data centre has two independent connections to two Points of Presence on the FibreSpeed network. Operating in tandem, they ensure an uninterrupted service.
It also benefits from emergency power, a sophisticated fire suppression system and energy efficient ‘free air’ cooling which uses ambient outside air temperature to keep the facility cool.
On-site staff supervise the facility on a 24/7 basis, providing security and access to some customers who choose to maintain their own servers. Most users prefer Hosting UK’s fully managed service.
The company is migrating some of its server space from Manchester and London to North Wales, though operations will remain in the two cities.
It has already launched its Exchange2Go business email service and thanks to its extra capacity will soon offer VPS2Go, a range of virtual private server packages for businesses looking for a managed IT service.
Hosting UK was formed more than a decade ago from a successful IT consultancy which counted HBOS, Pilkington Glass and Everton FC among its clients.