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Bytemark started in 2001 as a consulting firm based in York, UK. Its directors are experienced software and network engineers Matthew Bloch and Peter Taphouse. They combined their experience to build one of the UK’s 'nerd hosting outfit of choice'.
Bytemark operates its own network under AS number 35425. We are fully multi-homed, receiving full transit from different suppliers as well as partial feeds and peering from others.
Our hosting is spread across two data centres in London, and two in Manchester, with further expansion planned by summer 2011.
We been lucky enough to manage thousands of customers with a small but dedicated team; here’s a short biography on each of the core group so you know who you’re dealing with.
If you’re looking for work at Bytemark we post information for potential future employees and contractors here.
Small but perfectly formed
Our team of experts.
We have grown to a team of eight full time staff, preferring to
automate and work on efficiency, leaving people to work on the hard
problems. Having a relatively small team means that Bytemark is
constantly aware of its customers' needs and has no excessive management burden.
The company philosophy continues to be 'built by hand'. Our software, servers and network are completely of our own design. Fewer suppliers mean we take responsibility for everything that goes on, at a high level of detail, and we think that gives our customers more confidence in the services they buy from us.
Technical History
Peter and Chris in our racks.
As consultants, we had been surprised how well free virtual machine technology worked, even back in 2001. It worked well enough that we were able to economise on our own hosting by offering our consulting customers virtual machine hosting, and we didn't have to pay a penny for commercial solutions. This gave us the idea to reformed around hosting rather than consulting.
After trialling the virtual machine system with some volunteers from September 2002, the service was developed commercially and now provides a cheap and flexible hosting platform that we continue to develop.
2004
We decided relatively quickly after forming that to survive for the long term, we should be in control of our racks and IP space. 2004 was the year that we joined RIPE as full members, acquired our first network addresses and started to maintain our own network. We also started serious investment in racks in Redbus Sovereign House.
We also started to offer dedicated servers, whose prices have come down over the years, despite rack costs continuing to rise.
2006
We invested in our first full cage in Redbus Meridian Gate.
2007
We became one of the first ISPs with the technical expertise to support the Xen hypervisor directly on customers dedicated servers. Furthermore we started on a major expansion of our data centre floor space with Internet Facilitators Limited in Manchester.
2008
Introduction of our wholesale anti-spam and anti-virus solution starting at only 50p per domain, and an open source, and uniquely easy-to-use Debian distribution which makes root access easier to handle.
A further major expansion in Manchester.
2009
Another cage signed in Manchester, and expansion into UKGrid's Synergy House data centre. We also hired three more staff to cope with increased customer demand for our managed services.
2010
As well as offering clustered hosting that spanned into our new UKGrid data centre, we launched our storage monster boxes, and near-doubled our virtual machine RAM at each price point.
A solid infrastructure
In over five years of business, Bytemark has great contracts with our three data centres and has expanded its network to provide multiple feeds, peering and more redundancy than ever before.
“Thanks a million for your help and support this afternoon in diagnosing and fixing the timeout issues we were experiencing - since your latest intervention and update we've not seen a single request fail and the platform appears quite stable ... I'm incredibly grateful for the willingness, speed and skill by which you rolled up your sleeves and dived in to fix the issues.”
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