100% Uptime

We offer unparalleled reliability and security, with no downtime during updates and full service availability during planned maintenance. With reliability central to our architecture, Postcode Anywhere services operate on ‘never fail’ technology, ensuring total reliability and availability 24/7.

Keeping the service running

Postcode Anywhere use two separate data centres in different parts of the UK to make sure we're always on. Queries are served in under 50 milliseconds and a complex security infrastructure, across thousands of lines of code, guards against misuse. The company is accredited to ISO 27001 - the International Standard for data security. We offer unparalleled reliability and security, with no downtime during updates and no scheduled downtime either. Service continuity is exceptionally important to us which is why we've taken considerable steps to ensure that Postcode Anywhere is always available:

• Two completely autonomous data centres
• Load balanced servers in each data centre
• Data centres employ fully diverse routing and multiple carriers
• Automatic failover between servers and between data centres
• No single point of failure

All this means that even a catastrophic failure of a data centre can be tolerated and will not impact on the availability of Postcode Anywhere. Traffic will simply re-route to the other data centre within 60 seconds.

Postcode Anywhere is accredited to ISO27001:2005

The International Standard for security management. It specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving a documented Information Security Management System within the context of an organisation's overall business risks. Ultimately, the standard ensures best practice for security controls to protect information assets.

Download Postcode Anywhere’s information security policy here.

One of the UK's largest dedicated suppliers of hosted data

Postcode Anywhere is one of the UK's largest dedicated suppliers of hosted data. Our customers include National Savings & Investments, HMRC, BA, Heinz, UNICEF, Royal Mail (yes, we sell PAF® back to them too!) and CitiBank. Postcode Anywhere's hosting platform is purpose-built, with sophisticated security, auditing, management and monitoring central to its architecture. Our systems are monitored 24 hours a day by on-call engineers.

100% service availability

Since 2006 we have achieved 100% service availability through our unique infrastructure design (our target is 99.999% uptime: that's less than five minutes’ downtime per year). This is significantly better than our competitors, most of whom aim to achieve just 99.9%, which equates to downtime of over eight hours - or one working day - each year. Postcode Anywhere's uptime stats also include maintenance - most uptime stats exclude 'planned maintenance' windows which can last many hours and actually render websites unusable overnight.

Importantly, our service infrastructure is maintained by us, and exclusive to our systems. Unlike some providers, who host their data with third-party public services, all of our systems are managed by us. We do not share our infrastructure with other organisations, which means that our top priority is our customers.

Because of this, we are in the unique position of having two independent data centres and sophisticated replication systems – something impossible for vendors operating with third-party systems. This not only means we can deliver on our uptime guarantees, but ensures that when we schedule updates on one data centre, we can keep the service running on the other.

Performance that is impossible using traditional platform design patterns

We heavily optimise our web servers, database servers and hardware. Increasingly, we replace off-the-shelf databases with our own engines for the most performance-critical services. We deploy new services with agility, provide unparalleled customer support and a degree of performance, reliability and availability not possible by using traditional platform design patterns.

IP addresses and ports

Both the Postcode Anywhere web site and the web services are load balanced as detailed above. Generally subsequent connections to the service are made to the same data centre and the same server but this can change under certain conditions.

For this reason, you should be aware of the different IP addresses and ports used by the website and web service if you restrict access to Postcode Anywhere using firewall rules:

Website IP addresses: www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk

Primary data centre (70% traffic load under normal conditions)
217.10.139.201 port 80 (HTTP)
217.10.139.201 port 443 (HTTPS - only used for online purchases)

Secondary data centre (30% traffic load under normal conditions)
194.75.186.201 port 80 (HTTP)
194.75.186.201 port 443 (HTTPS - only used for online purchases)

Web service IP addresses: services.postcodeanywhere.co.uk

Primary data centre (70% traffic load under normal conditions)
217.10.139.200 port 80 (HTTP)
217.10.139.200 port 443 (HTTPS - only used for online purchases)

Secondary data centre (30% traffic load under normal conditions)
194.75.186.200 port 80 (HTTP)
194.75.186.200 port 443 (HTTPS - only used for online purchases)

All web service facilities are available over HTTPS as well as HTTP. HTTP offers the fastest performance while HTTPS is the most secure choice and always recommended for sensitive services, e.g. Payment Validation. Please note that HTTPS requests typically take slightly longer because of the more complex HTTP session set-up procedure.

A hugely complex security infrastructure

There’s a hugely complex security infrastructure to protect every customer’s account and the service’s integrity, as well as an array of monitoring and management systems. Postcode Anywhere has the technology to match the right service to every client, whether it’s a web service for small business or an on-premise, hosted solution for our enterprise customers. We can even offer the flexibility of our web service combined with failover to a hosted service.

Don't take our word for it...

We regularly hear from customers who have spared the time to put a friendly word our way. Here are some of the nicest quotes we've found in our inbox:

We are really pleased with the service from Postcode Anywhere - in fact the service has been faultless during our testing phases and since we've gone live. - Virgin Money