First affordable, secure hosting services for small businesses in Oxford now available

OXFORD, U.K. - July 25, 2014 - PRLog -- From 1 August 2014, small businesses in Oxford will have an affordable solution to the problem of running their IT servers securely offsite as local IT support company First Line IT opens a new datacentre to host servers and other systems from as little as £30 a month.

The datacentre, which will have space for over 80 physical servers and firewalls, all with full power and connectivity, will initially be located in First Line’s current premises on Howard Street, East Oxford.

All customers’ hosted services will also be duplicated in another datacentre in Milton Keynes, providing additional security in the event of an Oxford-wide disaster.

“The floods that affected so many parts of the country earlier this year have alerted many small businesses to the risks of maintaining their servers in their own buildings.

But until now, what we call ‘co-location’ of servers has just been too expensive for many of them to consider it,” said John Crozier, First Line IT Operations Director. “Also the lack of a local facilities meant that anyone who could afford to host their systems off-site had to locate them in another city, which carried another set of risks.”

Potential customers are invited to visit First Line to see the facility in action. The services range from renting a single unit of space, in which customers can place their own servers, to renting both the space and the servers, or even asking First Line to host a ‘virtual’ server(s).

Customers can use the centre to run all of their day-to-day IT systems, or just to host a replica of their business-critical systems as part of a disaster-recovery plan.

“Small businesses have particular needs that are not always met by the typically large, anonymous datacentres,” said John. “Through our years of providing IT support to small businesses in Oxfordshire, we know how important it is to deliver a personal, flexible and responsive service that fits with their budgets and can adapt as their businesses grow.Potential customers can come and visit us to see the datacentre and meet the team to reassure themselves that their servers will be in good hands.”