Servebolt is continuously growing and evolving into the position of a global hosting provider. Many clients a long time have been requesting a Servebolt hosting offer in the UK. Today, we are happy to announce that Servebolt will be launching its first Servebolt Cloud location in the United Kingdom – Servebolt Cloud LON.
Update: Servebolt Cloud LON has been live since August 14th, 2020
The new Servebolt Cloud location will be in central London, at the Equinix LD8 data center, and be launched before the end of August 2020. That is, of course, if everything goes as planned and COVID-19 doesn’t cause any unexpected delays.
Great web performance starts with low network latency between the client and server. The new location will provide exceptional performance for sites and applications that have the UK and surrounding areas as their core market.
Approximate ping times to London from central cities in the area
| Amsterdam | 6.88ms |
| Belfast | 10.29ms |
| Bristol | 4.259ms |
| Cardiff | 5.648ms |
| Carlow | 13.01ms |
| Cheltenham | 4.35ms |
| Coventry | 7.48ms |
| Dublin | 12.32ms |
| Edinburgh | 10.44ms |
| Frankfurt | 13.54ms |
| Maidstone | 1.35ms |
| Manchester | 6.88ms |
| Newcastle | 12.03ms |
| Paris | 8.94ms |
The new Servebolt Cloud location in the UK will also help all our UK clients in their work on protecting their visitors and customers’ privacy by not sending UK traffic across borders to fetch the content on UK websites. Like all Servebolt Cloud locations, the London location will also be privacy and security-focused and comply with GDPR. All backups are done off-site to a secret location within the EEA/EU.
Along with being compliant with our performance and interconnectivity standards, the Equinix LD8 data center also has the following certifications:
- ISO 14001:2004
- ISO 22301
- SOC 1 Type II
- PCI-DSS
- SOC 2 Type II
- ISO 27001
- ISO 50001
- OHSAS 1800
PHP 7.4 and above
When we launch a new location, there is always the question of which PHP versions to support at the new location. Since Servebolt is committed to doing our part of keeping the internet up to date, we will not launch new locations with support for PHP versions that have less than a year left of their lifespan. Therefore our new location in London will only support PHP 7.4, with PHP 7.3 support available to enterprise clients by request.
We have a lot of sites that have their primary market in the UK currently hosted in Amsterdam. For these sites, we don’t recommend moving purely because of the performance benefit, and wait until your site is ready to upgrade to the next or newest PHP version. The decision to move is, however, your choice, and our support team will happily help you migrate your site to the new location Servebolt Cloud LON, in London.
The first Servebolt Cloud location within 10ms of another
Until now, Servebolt has focused on establishing new locations to cover large regions of the world, like the US, Europe, and Asia. The UK location is the first Cloud location we establish that is less than 10ms away from another Servebolt Cloud location. Until now, the two closest locations have been Oslo and Amsterdam, with approximately 23ms between them.
With the establishment of the UK data center, we commit to establishing data centers not only on each continent but also in key regions on each continent. This will contribute to even greater web performance by slicing off milliseconds in network latency for the more locally-focused businesses.
As always, close to a Cloudflare node
Servebolt has a close partnership with Cloudflare, and we recommend all our clients add a Cloudflare plan to their Servebolt hosting. To ensure the best possible performance for all sites running Cloudflare in front of Servebolt hosting, we always establish our new locations close to a Cloudflare node to minimize network latency between Servebolt Cloud and Cloudflare.
There may be only a few milliseconds difference in network latency between Cloudflare and Servebolt and our competitors. But when you aggregate the total volume of traffic and network latency, even 1 millisecond shaved off the network latency means hours upon hours saved in loading time for visitors visiting a site hosted on Servebolt with Cloudflare in front. Time saved delivering a website to a visitor also means less energy wasted, which again contributes to our commitment to building a more sustainable and environmentally friendly internet.
Continuing our cooperation with Blix Solutions
Like many of our previously launched data centers, Servebolt Cloud LON is launched in cooperation with Blix Solutions. Blix provides Servebolt with both co-location services and IP connectivity services.
Blix has multiple redundant connections to the Internet and has its own BGP network. They peer with other networks extensively, their network is present in the LINX exchange in London to ensure low latency and high uptime.
We’re starting our search for a UK-based customer relationship team
The launch of our new cloud location in the UK also soft-launches our search for a customer relations team in the United Kingdom. We believe in close relationships with our clients, and to be able to achieve that on a global scale, we need local teams working in the region our clients are based. Local teams can more easily communicate and interact with clients locally, not only in person but also online.
A customer relationship team at Servebolt will focus on making sure our clients get the most out of our product, are happy, and stay happy. They also provide input to our product and development team to make sure what Serebolt offers is what the client needs. It’s a combination of customer success, sales, marketing, and support.
So if you, or someone you know, could fit our team, please do not hesitate to send an email to [email protected] or check out our other open positions at Servebolt
