We sell hosted applications: your CRM, your files, your helpdesk, running behind one login on UK infrastructure. But what you are really buying is everything underneath those apps, and most hosting providers keep that part vague, because vague is easier to sell.
We think buyers deserve better. Under the hood is a series of short explainers, each taking one layer of the platform and answering the question a careful buyer would actually ask about it: what is this, why should I care, and how does Node really run it? No layer is dressed up, and nothing is described that we do not actually operate.
The series
Private connectivity: WireGuard
How do my devices reach my apps without crossing the public internet? How a modern VPN extends your tenant's private network to your laptops, phones and sites, with keys that never touch our servers.
Single sign-on
Why is one login safer than fifty passwords? What an identity realm is, why revoking one account everywhere at once matters more than any password policy, and how your existing directory federates in.
Automatic HTTPS
Who looks after the padlock? Why every app gets its own TLS certificate, how issuing and renewing them is automated, and why an expired certificate should be an extinct species.
Backups
If everything went wrong tonight, what would you actually get back? The difference between snapshots, scheduled backups and off-site disaster recovery, and which failure each one exists to survive.
Database failover
What happens when a database server dies mid-afternoon? How replicated database clusters keep accepting writes through a hardware failure, and what failover looks like from the outside (ideally, nothing).
Storage integrity
How do you know my data has not quietly corrupted? What silent corruption is, and how checksummed storage on ZFS detects and repairs it instead of faithfully backing up damage.
Kubernetes
Why do apps restart themselves and update without downtime? The orchestration layer, in plain English: self-healing, rolling updates, and the namespaces and quotas that keep every tenant in its own lane.
The whole picture
The series is deliberately one topic at a time. For the full tour, the layers in order from the metal up, with the reasoning behind each choice, read how the Node Platform is built. It is the single most complete description of the platform we publish, and everything in this series hangs off it.
And because much of what the engineering exists to protect is jurisdiction, where your data lives and whose law reaches it, the companion piece is UK data sovereignty, explained: what sovereignty claims actually mean, and how to test any provider's version of them, including ours.
If a page in the series raises a question it does not answer, ask us: the reply comes from an engineer who works on that layer, which is rather the point of the whole series.
Frequently asked questions
Why publish this level of detail at all?
Because hosting is a trust purchase, and trust you cannot check is just branding. We would rather describe how the platform actually works and let you judge it than hide behind vague assurances. Every claim in this series is about machinery we really run, and where a limitation exists we state it rather than write around it.
Do I need to understand any of this to use the platform?
No. Everything described in the series is our job: you choose apps in the portal and your team signs in. The series exists for the moment before that, when you are deciding whether to trust a provider, and for the technical colleague who will quite reasonably ask what is actually underneath.
Is any of this a premium tier or an optional extra?
No. Everything in the series, the isolation, the backups, the failover, the certificates, the single sign-on, is how the platform works for every tenant by default. Redundancy and security are designed in, not sold as add-ons.
Where should I start if I only read one page?
Read how the Node Platform is built, which tours the whole stack in one sitting. Then, if one layer matters more to your decision than the rest, backups for some businesses, data sovereignty for others, go straight to that page.