They say that “distance makes the heart grow fonder,” but in the world of web hosting, distance just makes your email slow, cranky, and prone to disappearing when you need it most.

Recently, we were approached by a large engineering firm based in North Yorkshire, UK. They were facing a bit of a digital nightmare: over 150 critical email accounts running on a virtual server that was, for reasons known only to history, located in Sydney, Australia.

Now, we love our friends Down Under, but if you’re an engineering firm in Yorkshire trying to send a project update to a client in Leeds, routing that data through a 20,000-mile round trip to Sydney is… well, it’s not exactly efficient.

The Problem: Latency, Lag, and “Is It Down Again?” Because the server was old, underpowered, and physically located halfway across the planet, the company was plagued by “unreachable” errors. In the engineering world, where precision and timing are everything, having 150 staff members unable to sync their Outlook is more than just an annoyance—it’s a massive drain on productivity.

Luckily, one of our long-term D9 customers pointed them in our direction, hoping we could bring their data back to British soil and restore some sanity to their workdays.

The D9 Solution: Local Power. We didn’t just want to give them a “fix”; we wanted to give them an engine that would purr for years to come. We provisioned a beast of a dedicated server located in our UK data centre:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7900 (High-performance processing for rapid email indexing)

• RAM: 64 GB DDR5 (The latest and greatest, ensuring zero lag even with 150+ active users)

• Drives: 2 x 4 TB NVMe (Blazing disk speeds plus a 6 TB SATA drive for local backups and daily offsite backups for piece of mind)

• Location: Coventry, UK (Housed in a Tier III/IV standard facility with 2N+1 power redundancy and ultra-fast 1.2Tb/s connectivity)

By moving them to our UK infrastructure, we weren’t just upgrading their hardware; we were cutting their latency from hundreds of milliseconds down to almost single digits.

The Move: 800GB and a Weekend “Magic Trick.” Moving 150 accounts isn’t just about clicking ‘copy and paste’—especially when you’re dealing with over 800 GB of data sitting on a slow, struggling VPS in Australia. It’s a bit like trying to empty a swimming pool using a drinking straw.

Our team spent several days performing the “initial pull,” slowly migrating the bulk of that nearly-a-terabyte of data in the background so the client could keep working.

Then came the “Big Switch.” Over the weekend, while the engineering team was home putting their feet up, we performed a final data sync to grab any new emails and flipped the DNS switches.

The Result: Zero Downtime, Total Stability. On Monday morning, the staff logged in as usual. There were no “server not found” errors, no spinning wheels of death, and—most importantly—zero downtime during the transition. The only thing they noticed was that their email was suddenly snappy again.

The Moral of the Story? If your business is in the UK, your data probably should be too. Not only does it help with GDPR and data sovereignty, but it also makes everything run the way it was designed to.

If you’re currently hosting your business services on the other side of the world (or even just on a server that’s seen better days), get in touch. We’ve got the tools, the UK-based hardware, and the patience to move 800GB worth of emails if we have to!

D9 Hosting have been hosting tens of thousands of websites for businesses and individuals since 2007. If you aren't already a customer, why not sign up and try our super fast, reliable servers backed up by true 24/7 technical support provided by Red Hat certified engineers.