A Little About SharkServers

Fat Shark Limited (Trading as SharkServers) is a world-wide provider of shared, VPS and dedicated hosting services. Privately owned and based in Reading, UK, the company was founded in 2014 by joining forces of three other web hosting companies.

SharkServers has worked hard to differentiate itself from the background of unresponsive, mediocre, and sometimes downright dishonest hosting companies that pervade the market.

Our founding principles are:

  • Decent support is a right, not a privilege
  • Artificial limits are bad
  • For a fiver a month, at least 90% of our customers ought to be able to get what they need

We have always opposed the use of automated replies to support tickets. With us support requests will be answered by real people with technical knowledge, in a timely fashion.

A lot of our business comes from those who are dissatisfied with their current hosting arrangements.

All too often, those migrating to our service from elsewhere have experienced one or more of the following:

  • They requested support from a hosting company and never got a reply
  • They got a reply, but it took take days to arrive
  • The reply was an automated extract from a ‘knowledge base’ that didn’t answer their question
  • When they actually got to speak to a real person, they lacked the technical expertise to resolve the issue
  • They were charged extra for something they thought came as standard

We believe that every customer is entitled to a support request response written by someone who knows what they’re talking about, in a timely fashion, which is why our target is a response within 1 hour.

We won’t charge you for carrying out any work on your account – we’ll either do it for free, or not at all.

If you want a custom configuration change, we’ll try our best to implement it for you. If we can’t do it, we’ll explain why.

We don’t overload our servers and they’re monitored 24/7 for responsiveness. If the load on a server is too high, we’ll do something about it.

Technical Things

All our servers are located in datacentres that have redundant uplink connections to major Internet backbones. They also have redundant power supplies and the usual fire suppression systems.

If you want more technical detail, feel free to contact us. Suffice to say, our servers aren’t located in a budget facility, a home made-datacentre, or in a shed at the bottom of a garden somewhere.

Our hosting is LAMP-based (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl). We specialise in hosting for Joomla and WordPress-based sites, but you don’t have to use Joomla or WordPress to use our service – it’s a robust platform for almost anything. You can have PHP 5.3, or PHP 5.4 enabled on your account, and if you need something special, or a custom config, just ask us - we're happy to try and accomodate you.

Things you should know

We’re a technically-minded hosting company run by technically-minded individuals. As a result, we operate in a fashion that might not suit the most pointy-haired of customers.

Our primary means of communication is by e-mail or ticket system. While this keeps costs down, we feel it also has advantages in terms of clearly setting out the solutions to problems and queries from customers.

We like our support system. It is efficient for us, and it is efficient for our customers, to communicate in this way.

Only when this method of communication breaks down, or in emergency situations, will we resort to telephoning you.

Although servers are monitored 24/7 to ensure optimal uptime, customer-facing support is not 24/7 (although it does operate 7 days a week).

You may submit a support request at any time of day, but you’re unlikely to receive a response in less than an hour if you do so at 2am (although it’s not impossible that you will).

If there’s anything you want to ask us, feel free – you’ll get an answer, in a timely fashion. If you think you haven’t heard from us – double check your spam trap and junk mail folders.