Resilience and Business Continuity

Infrastructure

The service runs on a dedicated server hosted at Hetzner’s datacentre in Helsinki, Finland. Hetzner is one of Europe’s most established and reputable hosting providers, with enterprise-grade physical security and power redundancy.

All web traffic is routed through Cloudflare, which provides DDoS protection, a web application firewall, edge caching, and automatic failover. The combination of Hetzner’s physical infrastructure and Cloudflare’s network layer means the service has no single point of failure at the infrastructure level.

Server health is monitored continuously, with alerts configured for downtime and anomalous behaviour. As a matter of policy, the server is maintained well within its capacity envelope — significant RAM and compute headroom is kept in reserve at all times, so the system is never under material strain. In the event of unexpected demand growth, the server can be rescaled vertically within minutes via the Hetzner console, with no migration and no downtime.

Data and Security

No payment card data is held by Gadsden Valuations. All payment processing is handled by Stripe, which maintains its own PCI DSS compliance. Gadsden Valuations holds only a Stripe customer reference.

All data in transit is encrypted via TLS. Property valuation requests and results are stored in a PostgreSQL database on the same Hetzner infrastructure. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (registration ZC104915).

Sub-processors: Hetzner (hosting), Stripe (payments), Resend (transactional email), Cloudflare (CDN and WAF), Google Analytics (anonymised usage data, accepted by users via cookie consent).

Personnel and Key-Person Risk

Andrew Gadsden (founder and sole developer) is the primary operational dependency. This is an acknowledged risk, and it is addressed honestly here.

However, its practical significance is more limited than it might appear. The service runs on infrastructure that operates independently of any individual. In the event of Andrew’s death or extended incapacity, the website and API do not cease to function — they continue operating normally. A lender using the API on the day of any such event would notice nothing.

Charlotte Gadsden (co-director) holds full access to all company accounts, infrastructure credentials, and systems. In the event of Andrew’s incapacity, she would have three options: maintain the service with developer support, sell the business as a going concern, or wind it down in an orderly fashion and refund unused credits. The codebase is well-documented, written to accepted standards, and deployable by any competent Laravel and Python developer. The Meridian model is version-controlled and fully reproducible from source, with no dependency on closed proprietary components or knowledge held only in Andrew’s head. These factors make the business genuinely acquirable, not merely inheritable.

It is also worth noting that every RICS-regulated surveyor on a lender’s panel — the majority of whom operate as sole practitioners — issues valuations that directly determine lending decisions worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, without a business continuity plan, a succession agreement, or alternative coverage arrangement. The risk presented by Gadsden Valuations in a supplementary capacity is not materially greater, and the lender’s exposure is capped at the value of a small credit bundle.

Commercial and Financial Resilience

Gadsden Valuations carries no debt. There are no financial covenants, no investor obligations, and no payroll. The cost base is negligible — primarily server hosting and third-party API costs. The business cannot become insolvent through loss of clients in any normal sense: it has no fixed financial obligations that revenue must service.

The only balance-sheet liability at any given moment is the value of unused prepaid valuation bundles, all of which are refundable in full at the client’s request. For institutional clients, we are happy to discuss invoicing in arrears by prior arrangement, which eliminates this liability entirely and reflects standard B2B payment practice.

No single client can represent a material proportion of revenue by the nature of the pricing model. There is no concentration risk.

What Actually Happens If We Cease Trading

If Gadsden Valuations ceased trading, the practical consequence for a lender is that it would lose a supplementary valuation source. Its primary AVM provider is unaffected. Panel surveyors are unaffected. Underwriting processes are unaffected. The lender’s maximum financial exposure is the face value of any unused credits, which would be refunded.

This is the correct frame for evaluating our business continuity risk. We are not a critical dependency. We are a second opinion at 20 pence.