PixelCodeLab

The platform

Built once. Watched every five minutes.

Every site the studio builds runs on the same setup: one server, one shared library of code, and a second machine somewhere else whose only job is to notice when something breaks. This page says exactly what that means, because most studios will not.

Uptime, 30 days
98.02%
across every site we host
Sites watched
6
5 answering right now
Checks, 30 days
13,846
one every five minutes, per site
You hear about it in
10 min
two failed checks in a row
Measured by the monitoring machine, not by the sites themselves, and refreshed every ten minutes.
Read the live status page ↗ What it costs

The server

One machine in the United Kingdom, rented and run by the studio, not resold to you.

  • Each site runs in its own container, so one busy site never slows another.
  • Cloudflare sits in front of every site and absorbs the traffic a small server cannot.
  • A deploy runs the test suite first. A red suite never reaches the server.
  • The database is dumped before every migration, so a bad change has a way back.

Watching

A second machine, at a different company, checks every site from outside the network it lives on.

  • Every five minutes: the page, how long it took, and the certificate behind it.
  • An alert goes out on the second failure in a row, which is about ten minutes.
  • The alert reaches Luke by email and by phone push, through two companies that share nothing with the server.
  • A public status page carries 90 days of history, and it stays up when the server does not.
  • A dead machine says nothing, so a timer elsewhere raises the alarm when the watcher goes quiet.

Backups

A copy of your site leaves the server every night and lands somewhere else.

  • The database is dumped nightly and kept for 14 days.
  • A copy is sent off the server to the monitoring machine.
  • The monitor raises a fault when no backup arrives for 36 hours, because a backup that stops quietly is how people find out too late.
  • Files you upload live on the same disk as the site and travel with it.

Security

The boring parts, done the same way on every site.

  • HTTPS everywhere, with certificates that renew themselves and a warning 14 days out when a renewal fails.
  • Your admin panel takes a passkey or a code as a second factor.
  • Passwords and keys live in a vault the studio hosts, never in an email or a chat message.
  • The settings a site needs to run are encrypted in the code repository.
  • Nobody reaches the server over the open internet. Administration runs on a private network.
  • Framework and library updates land through the shared library, so a fix reaches every site at once.

Email

Your address stays yours, and the messages your site sends arrive.

  • Mailboxes run on the estate mail server, with webmail and your usual phone or desktop app.
  • Every domain is signed with DKIM and SPF, which is what keeps a form message out of the spam folder.
  • Enquiries from the site are stored in your panel as well as emailed, so a lost email is not a lost customer.
  • Alerts about an outage leave through a different provider on purpose. A mail server on the broken machine cannot report that the machine is broken.

And in your admin panel

  • Traffic dashboard. Visitors and pages, without Google Analytics or a cookie banner.
  • Enquiries inbox. Every form message stored and emailed, spam throttled.
  • Reviews on the site. Google or Trustpilot reviews synced nightly and marked up for search.
  • Search health. Titles, descriptions, sitemap and structured data audited on every deploy.
  • Checked every five minutes. Uptime and certificate monitoring with an alert to Luke, not to you.
  • Nightly backups. Database dumped before every deploy and every night, kept for 14 days.
  • Your own admin panel. Edit words, images, prices and pages yourself.
  • Care plan. Updates, fixes and small changes each month, from GBP 49.

Every site is checked every five minutes from outside the server, by a machine at another company. How a site is run · Live status page ↗

Your site can run on this too.

Care plans start at £49 a month and cover the server, the watching, the backups and the updates. Moving an existing site over is a fixed price.

Talk to Luke See pricing