Large corporate offerings, small company charms are a way of life at 2020Media.

Founded in 1999 under the motto: “small enough to care, large enough to cope”, 2020Media has proven that, although a small, privately-owned Web hosting company, it is capable of offering services to a range of customers, from home-based individuals to multi-million pound corporations.

“A lot of people ask us – can you describe your customers? Are they business or consumers?” said Alan Barnett, director at 2020Media. “To us, it doesn’t matter… What matters to us is that the customer gets what he needs.”

2020Media originally began as a Java hosting outlet. But since that time, it has grown to offer shared hosting, PHP and ASP, among others. However, its Java roots are still important, since the company houses more Java clients than any other Web hosting company in the U.K., says Barnett.

“We were one of the very first companies in the U.K. to offer Java,” said Barnett. “The clients who came to us had actually been buying hosting services from companies in the States. And they found that they had support issues – they couldn’t sign up during the mornings, and they wanted a U.K.-based provider… We were one of the very few people doing it and who understood it.”

Bringing the Oracle platform to the U.K. shared hosting environment is another pioneering step for 2020Media.

“In the same way that shared hosting works by taking one server and putting 50 Web sites on it and selling it to 50 companies so that they all share the costs of the server, they share the costs of the server license. We’re doing the same with Oracle and that is pretty unique,” said Barnett. “We are pioneering. Basically what we are doing is bringing down the costs of these more corporate technologies and bringing them into the shared hosting market.”

This is a very cost-effective solution for the small and medium businesses: getting the best technology at a price they can afford.

Ensuring that its Web hosting environment stays robust, 2020Media has spread itself throughout multiple data centres to provide stability. The hardware is constantly monitored for the best possible performance.

“We’re not a large company that has built our own data centres, so we rent space in the key London data centres,” said Barnett. “And basically, it’s to be provider independent… If there are any problems, whether it has to do with third party actions, or the companies that we are buying services from, we can switch pretty instantly to protect our clients.”

And, instead of housing everything on one server, 2020Media offers Web sites, e-mail, and domain names on different platforms to ensure 100 percent capability.

“If something goes wrong, everything goes wrong and that is not what customers want. If for example, a customer receives — someone sends them — the contents of a CD ROM in an e-mail, they don’t want that to affect the performance of the Web site. Why should they?”

A firewall is also included with each plan, so customers don’t need to worry about who might be hacking into their Web sites. 2020Media also offers a spam filter, but it seems that wireless devices users take advantage of this service more often than PC-based users do.