ThinkGrid's virtual serversare backed by SLAs guaranteeing 99.99% availability. In the simplest possible terms, this means that we have to make sure they're available to you 99.99% of the time, otherwise we start to lose money.

Absolutely. For customers with an existing IT infrastructure, our virtual servers are designed to be a seamless extension of your network. The ThinkGrid model is based around being able to deploy our services on the size and scale you want, whether all of your infrastructure is hosted, or only a tiny part of it. Utilise VPN or connectivity between sites for seamless cloud integration.

You can even import existing Physical, VMware or Parallels servers into the cloud, helping you quickly migrate and rationalise costs without having to add disruption to process.

Yes, but only to the extent that you want to. In terms of management, our model is based on allowing you to be as hands-on or as hands-off as you choose. You can reboot and manage them as if they were sitting in your own location

Immediately. Additional resources such as CPU, RAM and disk space can be added instantly, on-the-fly, without even having to reboot. Billing for additional resources is equally seamless, and they're simply added onto your monthly bill for the period in which you use them.

In short, hosted applications offer unparalleled safety and security, though this question of security covers a number of different areas. Because all data resides in our data centres rather than on local machines, it cannot be lost or stolen, nor is it subject to individual hardware failure. Similarly, because the servers are constantly backed up, data cannot be accidentally erased or corrupted. To ensure the security of our model, we run multiple data centres on a highly available, fully resilient, constantly mirrored, grid computing model to ensure 99.99% availability even in the unlikely event of a disaster at one of our data centres

Our data centres are entirely secure, in all respects. In terms of power, all data centres have multiple power feeds from separate substations, primary and secondary power distribution units and standby power generators onsite. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning requirements are met with 3,350 tons total refrigeration capacity with N+2 redundancy (5 chillers at 670 tons each), together with seven 30-ton CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioner) units inside our data rooms. In terms of physical security, all data centres have extensive CCTV, card reader access on all interior and exterior doors, and are staffed 24x7x365.

All data is continuously mirrored across our data centres to ensure it can be easily retrieved in the event of files being deleted or written over. Additional backups and snapshots of data can also be configured according to your requirements.

All ThinkGrid's services are backed by 24x7 support. Our support teams are all exclusively split into customer-specific pods. This means that you're always supported by the same people, allowing you to build a personal relationship with your support team and ensuring that any problems are always dealt with by people already familiar with your specific hosted services. Our support pods are also performance-targeted, of which the key component is direct customer feedback, meaning they're actively incentivised to produce happy customers.

Full technical support is offered in respect of ensuring that ThinkGrid's services are always available and working exactly as they should be. This support is available 24x7, is exclusively UK-based, and you'll be assigned a specific support pod to ensure any issues are always dealt with by the same people. Moreover, our SLAs guarantee the availability of our services to you. However, this does not encompass 'user' related support or technical support outside of the platform. For example, if, due to some problem,you were unable to open Word on your hosted desktop, this would fall within the remit of our support agreement. If, however, a user didn't know how to use the 'Track Changes' feature in Word, this would not be covered.

Should you choose to stop using ThinkGrid's services at the end of your contract, all your data will be returned to you and then entirely removed from our system.