EC2 in London
Sites run on Ubuntu 24.04 EC2 instances in eu-west-2, with nginx, PHP 8.4 and a PHP-FPM pool per site, so one site’s busy afternoon doesn’t become another’s problem.
Built on AWS. Run by people who live in it.
AWS in London, our own control plane on CloudPanel, and years of running busy sites. We handle the rest.
BY THE NUMBERS
Real work, already running.
These come from the sites we host today, not from a brochure.
288kpublic media files served from S3 through CloudFront
6sites with their own
media. CDN hostname600/600requests answered during a live release switch
25operator tools our agents and dashboard can call
AMAZON WEB SERVICES
We don’t just use AWS. We’re good at it.
Plenty of hosts resell a box and hope. We design the account, the permissions and the recovery plan, then keep tuning them.
Amazon RDS
Databases that matter live on managed RDS with automated backups and restore points, rather than on the same disk as the web server.
S3 and CloudFront media
New uploads go straight to a private S3 bucket and out through CloudFront on the site’s own hostname. Old links get proper 301s, and we compare every file before we switch anything.
Keys stay with us
Sites never hold AWS credentials. A small broker on the host checks which site is asking at the kernel level and only lets it write to its own prefix. Instance metadata is locked down too.
Backups you can restore
Media is versioned and backed up daily by AWS Backup for 30 days. Deploy history is bundled to S3 and verified. We restore test files before trusting a new backup, because a backup nobody has restored is only a hope.
A daily AWS digest
Every morning we get a plain report on the host, the database, the media bucket and the cache, so surprises are rare and small.
ACEHOST CONTROL PLANE
CloudPanel, taken a lot further.
We started with CloudPanel and kept building. AceHost is our own control plane on top of it, tracked in Git like everything else.
- WordPress and WooCommerce sites provisioned with a clean
/coreand/assetslayout and shared uploads that survive every release. - Git-aware deploys: each release is its own worktree, the switch is a single atomic rename, and a release that fails a post-deploy step switches itself back.
- A Git workspace in the browser to review, stage, commit and push live changes, so nothing drifts away from the repository.
- A PHP slow-log debugger that groups incidents, suggests fixes and opens GitHub issues.
- Assistants for vhost, Varnish and PageSpeed settings that explain their advice rather than guessing.
- Cloudflare cache purges, development mode and SSL settings from the same screen as the site.
FAST AT EVERY LAYER
Cache what’s safe. Never cache what isn’t.
Cloudflare at the edge
DNS, TLS and edge caching through Cloudflare, with purges wired into deploys. Mail records stay DNS-only, so verification and delivery keep working.
Our own Redis cache
Ace Redis Cache is our WordPress page and object cache. It warms real pages after each release and stands aside for logged-in users, baskets and checkouts.
Varnish and Redis, purged as one
Varnish answers repeat visits straight from memory. Every purge reaches Varnish and Redis together, so neither serves a stale page, and anything personal, such as baskets, checkouts and signed-in pages, is never stored.
OPERATIONS IN DISCORD
Meet Ace, our operations bot.
Our team chat has a bot plugged into the platform. It shows live CPU, memory, disk, database, media bucket and cache health in its status, posts every deploy and incident as it happens, and answers questions like “what’s wrong with this site?” with real data.
- Around 50 slash commands for site status, errors, logs, caches, backups, Git and deploys.
- 95+ platform events reported, from new sites to finished deploys.
- Anything that changes a site needs an allowlisted operator and a confirmation button. There is no open shell from chat.
- We can spin up bots like this for a client’s own server, stats or stock.
ANALYTICS, WITHOUT THE CREEP
Numbers you can trust, consent you can see.
Across the sites we run, Google Analytics, Clarity and similar tools stay switched off until a visitor says yes, Do Not Track counts as a no, and Google gets proper Consent Mode signals. Our own SEO plugin counts people and bots separately, so you can see what is really read and what is just crawled. This website runs no analytics or advertising cookies at all.
IN THE LAB
What we’re building next.
Customer and reseller panel
An invite-only panel with two-factor sign-in is being built. It opens only once tests prove every customer sees and changes their own sites, and nobody else’s.
FROM THE BLOG
How we run servers, in plain English.
We write up what works on our own servers so you can use it on yours, with the commands included.
STRAIGHT TALK
Yes, this is a hosting business. A careful one.
We sell managed hosting. Right now we’re testing the waters with ten invited beta sites before we open more widely, and we’d rather tell you what’s live and what isn’t than oversell a dashboard. If you want a host that knows AWS inside out and replies in person, start a conversation.