[James]

Hi Julian,

Thank you for your interest in Web Hosting UK's services.

I've answered all your questions as following:

Originally Posted by Julian

Firstly, is it possible to host SugarCRM with a Linux cPanel hosting account? I think it just needs PHP and MySQL and the data size will be tiny.

SugarCRM works on both Linux as well as Windows platform. You can consider one of our cPanel hosting plan to run SugarCRM website.

Originally Posted by Julian

Next, I would want to be confident that my data is secure. I see that the cpanel plans all have a tick against the "Shared SSL" feature. What does this mean? Does this mean that I get "out of the box" (if you see what I mean) ability to establish an https connection to a subdomain of my main domain? If not then what would I need to do to ensure that the traffic between my browser and my web site is encrypted for either cpanel or vps hosting?

We have Shared SSL installed on all our shared servers. Shared SSL allows you to browse your website with https://server.hostname/~username/ If you opt for Dedicated SSL then you will be able to browse your website with https://www.yourdomain.com If you wish to establish an https connection to a subdomain of your main domain then you will have to consider Wildcard SSL. Wildcard is an ideal solution if you need to secure multiple fully qualified domains that share the same base domain name, reside on the same physical server and share the same second level domain name.

Note: Shared SSL is not offered on VPS and Dedicated Servers. You will need to consider Dedicated or Wildcard SSL with VPS/Dedicated Servers.

Originally Posted by Julian

Next, how does the security (privacy) of the data on the hard drive compare between a cpanel hosting plan and a vps hosting plan? How can I be confident that other customers sharing my node won't accidentally get access to my data? For vps is each customer account running as a different Linux (or Windows) user on the node so that the security is handled by file permissions on the underlying shared Linux file system and each user only sees their portion of the tree? How does the Virtuozzo enforce seperation? Is there any practical difference? My suspicion is that effectively cpanel and vps are the same in that theoretically there is total data seperation between users but in the unlikely event that a pointer or mapping variable got orrupted somewhere in the OS or in the Virtuazzo virtualisation layer then if one was really unlucky then another user might end up getting access to your data. The really transition point comes in going to 100% dedicated server when the hard drives are physically seperated.

Each VPS act as a stand alone server with its own partition. Each VPS uses its own disk space, OS, RAM, CPU, IP addresses and it can be rebooted independently. Each VPS user would have administrative root ssh access to his part of the server only. VPS are setup with Virtuozzo in such a manner that one VPS user can not access or read data of any other vps on the same node. As far as security of our shared servers is concerned, you can be rest assured about that as we have enough security measures in place to ensure that data of all clients on the servers remains safe at all times. Additionally we have disabled many functions on our shared servers including root access which could potentially compromise the security of a shared server.

Originally Posted by Julian

Next, how are backups handled? Do both cpanel and vps have the ability for 100% automated regular backups without the user needing to remember to log on and explicitly execute a backup? If so then is it possible for the system to send an email to either actively confirm each (nightly?) backup and/or to inform about a failed backup?

We maintain daily backup of all our shared servers and weekly backup of all our VPS nodes in case you wish to maintain separate backup of your data you can opt for our off site backup storage service which will allow you to configure daily incremental backups. The sytem will also send an email once the backup is completed. You can view the backup plan details at Backup Service | Offsite Data Backup Solutions | Web Hosting UK | Dedicated Server | VPS Hosting

Originally Posted by Julian

Finally, is the up status of the Apache server automatically monitored and the server restarted on failure when on a vps container or is it left entirely to the "owner" of the vps container to monitoer and manage the health of all software running within their container?

We have our in-house monitoring system in place which notifies our support team instantly if any of the services running on the VPS fail. We will add your VPS IP into that script which will notify you and our support team at the same time.

In case you have any more questions please do not hesitate to post here.