The hosting technology

Sites4Professionals buys its hosting for practice sites and the Site Management System from 1&1 Internet - ’The World’s Number One Web Host’. We have been with 1&1 since 2001, and have found the quality and reliability of their hosting service to be beyond reproach.

Most NHS websites are hosted on servers running Microsoft Windows, and in over three years managing sites for a whole local health community I experienced poor reliability with both Internet sites hosted commercially and intranets hosted on local servers. Our system runs on servers running Linux, a version of the UNIX operating system which has been the foundation of the Internet for many years - and which, interestingly, even the NHS uses forreally important functions, including the Exeter system that manages the payment of GPs!

Our package provides an infrastructure that has allowed us to develop a system that is fast, powerful and robust, and enables us to solve problems and make changes in response to client feedback very quickly. (For those interested in the technicalities, it uses the Apache web server software, and the huge amount of programming necessary to produce the Sites4Doctors package has been done using the PHP scripting language and the MySQL relational database management system. These are all examples of ’open source software’ which is under constant development by a huge international family of enthusiasts who charge nothing for the software but fund themselves by selling technical support. They provide a development environment which is technically demanding but pays huge dividends to experienced programmers, superior at all levels in our opinion to the Microsoft equivalents.)

The Sites4Professionals family of websites have been monitored hourly since setup, and since Sites4Doctors was launched in September 2004 has enjoyed almost 100% reliability, which compares very favourably with the Windows hosting used for NHS sites.