No More Heartache With Port 80’s New Standard VPS Hosting!

For the last five years, Port 80 has used a third-party provider for our Standard hosting service. The provider was Heart Internet, and they were selected on the basis of their reliability, uptime and customer service.

Heart Internet was bought out by another company in 2017 and unfortunately, we have since seen a decline in the quality of their service and in the reliability of their infrastructure. This led us to explore other options.

And so it is with pleasure we can now announce the end of our “Heartache” with the arrival of our brand new Standard VPS hosting service! In a similar set-up to our Premium hosting service, we have rented a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from Linode.

So what’s the difference?

Where Linode differs from Heart Internet and other shared hosting companies is that they don’t sell hosting plans where sites get crammed into a giant server along with all their other clients’ sites.

With Linode, you get a whole VPS server to yourself. You are able to actively configure and manage it, meaning you can customise it to your own needs. We are also talking about a considerably newer and higher-spec server than anything Heart offered.

With regular shared hosting, literally hundreds of websites are all stored together on one single server, and should just one of those act up, it can affect every single website on the server. And should that happen, you often have little recourse but to raise a support ticket and wait for the issue to be resolved. And wait and wait…

What does this mean for me?

In setting up our own server, the websites we host now have just tens of neighbours, as opposed to hundreds. And all of those neighbours are websites managed by us, so in the unlikely event of an issue, we can intervene directly. All of which for you, dear clients, mean faster loading times, more reliability, and less risk.

If you are an existing Standard hosting customer, we will be moving your site over to our zippy new VPS server over the coming weeks. You will not need to take any action and your website will not experience any downtime.

And best of all, our all-new Standard VPS hosting service is offered at the same low price!

Domains and emails: a little bit of an administrative hurdle

Heart Internet is a domain registrar and some of our clients’ domain names are held with them. They also offer email hosting services, and are the email solution for a number of our clients. As we are parting ways with Heart, this is all being transferred away too.

In the vast majority of cases, this will be a simple administrative process from our end and you will not need to take any action, or notice any difference.

For clients who use Heart for email services, this will involve email migration, and we will be in contact with you individually over the coming weeks to get you moved over.

We aim to have everything migrated by September 2020. We are really excited to be able to make this improvement to our Standard hosting service, and are looking forward to bidding a fond but firm farewell to Heart.