Our Technology
At StayGB we make our decisions on the technology we adopt being guided by the following standards.
Commitment to Open Standards and Open Source Software
From the computers we use daily to the servers used by our websites and systems and the applications and code run on them we ensure that we are using FREE, Open Source operating systems and an Open licensed code base. StayGB is a proud user of may flavours of Linux on both the desktop and our servers. The code at the heart of our systems is specifically developed for us by StayGB Cloud Ltd and is written from scratch. You will not find any Microsoft operating systems in use here.
Commitment to Data and System Security
Security of our systems and thus your data is of the utmost importance to us. Developing our own systems in house facilitates the rapid patching of any vulnerabilities and the continuous improvement of our products and services. Where possible we try to minimise our collection of personal data - to adopt our tourism advertising there is no login system required. We also are an advocate of static websites which are great from a speed as well as a security perspective.
Commitment to speed under load - scalable performance
At Stay GB we build systems which are designed to be scalable. All our websites must be capable of handling a traffic load of 1000 concurrent users at a predictable and acceptable cost. We are therefore experienced with static content (brilliant when served by NGINX), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Load Balanced servers and centralised in memory caching.
A note regarding Content Management Systems (CMSs)
At StayGB we do not use CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. These products are open source, however they are often used as the Swiss Army knife of the developer and thus loved and heavily promoted by cheap hosting companies. However, just as the Swiss Army knife they are not often the best choice when used continually for a specific purpose. Deviating from standard features and adding many extensions can lead to very poor performance under load, often requiring increasing operating costs as the hardware running a heavily used CMS driven website will need to be over-provisioned. When building websites that must scale CMSs are often not the best choice.
Author: Ollie Brown