Something we often hear from customers moving to Fabrik is that their existing website was unreliable or performed badly. Whilst factors such as the software or company used to build the site are important, the infrastructure used to host the website is usually overlooked.

In a world where design is everything, the process of building a new portfolio website is usually centred around the look and feel - the experience. However, a fundamental part of that experience is how it will perform. If your site looks great but takes 30 seconds to load, your visitors (or potential customers) will not stick around.

Often infrastructure is either not considered or not discussed in any detail. So why is it so important?

What happens when your website gets a big surge of visitors? Perhaps your latest design gets featured in an online magazine or a commercial you directed gets a staff pick on Vimeo. All of a sudden people from around the world want to know more about you. This is a wonderful thing, but not if your website can't handle it. If it grinds to a halt it's probably not your fault, but you only get one chance to make a first impression.

When you're considering having a new portfolio website built, don't be afraid to ask where it will be hosted. It's also important to understand what you are paying for. Some of our customers were charged extortionate rates for basic web hosting that could have been purchased from larger reputable companies for much less.

Every Fabrik subscription includes web hosting. With more talented individuals joining our platform every day we recently completed a huge infrastructure upgrade. These are the things you should care about.

Where is it?

Fabrik's infrastructure is built on Azure, Microsoft's Cloud Computing platform. The bulk of our services are hosted in the Azure Data Centre in Dublin, Ireland.

We chose Azure because it's fast, reliable and infinitely scalable. For you this means a website that delivers the absolute best experience to your visitors and confidence that you won't bring up your site in a client meeting only to be met with a big server error page (we've all been there!).

Elastic is Fantastic

We want you to get lots of traffic. It means things are probably going well for you and we're all about celebrating the success of the Fabrik community.

Although we communicate regularly with lots of our customers, we don't always know when someone wins an award or a commercial for a big brand goes live. It's usually a sudden increase in traffic to Fabrik that alerts us of this - so how do we ensure that we can always keep your website fast, no matter how much traffic you get?

One way would be to have someone constantly monitoring our servers and adding more resources when things get a bit busy. However, that would be incredibly boring and would give us less time to add awesome features to Fabrik.

Instead we use elastic-infrastructure. Our servers scale up and down automatically, giving us enough juice, whenever we need it.

Where are your customers?

You may not know the answer to this question, or at least you can't be sure exactly where your next customer will come from. This is the beauty of the internet and why having a website is so powerful.

So if we don't know where your customers are based, how do we ensure they receive the best possible experience when they view your website?

Fabrik uses Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to deliver your media content to customers using servers that are geographically located as close to them as possible.

This means a customer viewing your website in the US will not be waiting around to load beautiful high resolution images from across the pond; they'll be served by low latency, highly available servers in the same country.

Where is your data?

Everything in Fabrik is geo-replicated. Each byte of data we store is replicated to three other locations around the world. We also have replica databases to ensure maximum availability. These are backed up, encrypted and replicated around the world every day.

Who owns your data?

You do. All the data you upload to Fabrik is available through our API and if you need a copy of your digital assets, we'll make them available to you.