Our infrastructure
Many hosting providers resell someone else’s capacity. We do not, and that is why we can answer precisely the question “where is my data, and who can reach it”.
The facts
Six statements, all verifiable, none of them filler.
The hardware belongs to D&D
Servers, storage arrays and network equipment are our property. We buy them, we install them, we replace them.
We run it ourselves
Systems administration, virtualisation, storage and backups are carried out by the D&D team.
From Switzerland
The technical team is in Switzerland. There is no offshore operations team behind our infrastructure.
No external administrative access
Nobody outside D&D holds administrative access to the hypervisors or to the infrastructure carrying your machines.
No hyperscaler in the chain
Hosting our clients’ data relies on neither AWS, nor Azure, nor Google Cloud.
In a Swiss data centre
The hardware is installed in the Crissier data centre, in the canton of Vaud, whose characteristics are set out on a dedicated page.
Virtualisation
Most of the machines we host are virtual machines, carried by a virtualisation infrastructure that we own and administer.
Virtualisation brings two concrete benefits. First, a machine can be sized precisely and resized later, without buying new hardware each time. Second, if a physical host fails, a machine can restart on another host in the infrastructure — turning a hardware failure into a short interruption rather than a lost day.
The platform currently runs on VMware. A move to Proxmox is under consideration in the longer term. That kind of migration is carried out gradually and without discontinuity for existing machines; when the time comes, the clients concerned will be informed. We mention this because systems administrators reasonably ask, not because the name of a hypervisor should drive your choice of hosting provider.
Storage, backup and network
Storage
Storage for virtual machines is provided on D&D’s own infrastructure, in Switzerland.
Daily backup
Client virtual machines are backed up every day, on D&D’s Swiss infrastructure.
Optional replication
Where requirements justify it, replication to another infrastructure or data centre located in Switzerland can be put in place. See backup and high availability.
Hardware redundancy
The infrastructure includes hardware redundancy, and the environments allow machines to restart on another host when a failure occurs.
Connectivity
The infrastructure benefits from the data centre’s redundant connectivity.
Monitoring
The infrastructure is monitored automatically, and alerts are handled by D&D’s technical team.
What we do, and what we do not do
Knowing where a provider stops is as useful as knowing what it is good at.
We do
- Provide and operate the infrastructure: hardware, virtualisation, storage, network
- Create and size machines
- Install and maintain operating systems
- Back up, and restore when you ask
- Monitor the infrastructure and handle alerts
- Manage domains, DNS and email
- Migrate an existing infrastructure onto ours
We do not
- Functional integration of Odoo or any other business software
- Development of your business applications
- Support to the end users in your company
- Certification of your regulatory compliance
- Reselling a hyperscaler’s capacity under our own brand
When a request falls outside our scope, we say so — and where we can, we point you elsewhere. That is more useful than a “yes” you pay for later.
See also
A specific technical question?
Systems administrators and IT managers often have questions that no brochure answers. Ask them directly.