FEW internet users give much thought to how all that information arrives on their computer or smart phone.

In fact, most people’s understanding of where the internet comes from is unlikely to extend far beyond the router in their room or the cable under the road outside.

But a high-security building in Westbourne is one of the places that the internet exists in the physical world.

At the data centre owned by C4L, racks of servers store data for a long list of clients. Vodafone, Hilton, Zopa, WDS (part of the Xerox group) and BH Live all have data protected on C4L’s coreTX fibre network, which spans the whole of the UK. 

“It's effectively where the internet is held,” said founder and chairman Matt Hawkins.

“The internet exists in data centres around the world. There are 140 or so public ones in the UK.

“That’s where all your data sits – whether it’s on your iPhone backup or whether you’ve got your iTunes account or Gmail.”

The security procedures at C4L’s centre could come from a spy movie.

Once past the perimeter fence and gates, the user needs PIN codes to get into the building and the data floor. They then need to leave their thumb print on a scanner and pass through two sets of doors known as the 'man trap'.

The man trap looks like a teleport machine from a science fiction film, in which the user is photographed and weighed.

If anyone leaves the room taller or heavier than when they entered, the second set of doors will refuse to open until a member of staff comes to their aid.

In case of a power failure, a battery backup will instantly kick in to keep data secure. There are back-up generators and a host of measures to protect from overheating, dust and other threats.

The noisy racks of servers contain “many petabytes” of information, according to C4L’s founder and chairman, Matt Hawkins. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. If you’re counting in bytes, that’s a ‘1’ with 15 zeroes after it.

This and other C4L sites make up the largest privately owned data centre network in the UK.

All this started out as an offshoot of what the company was set up to do.

“It started as a web design company essentially,” said Mr Hawkins.

“Then I started server hosting.

“I thought I need to upscale the infrastructure that we had. I rented space at a data centre, got a network connection and realised that actually it was really complicated.”

It was the process of taking out the necessary contracts that led him to see a business opportunity.

“You had to put it all together yourself. Once I’d managed to put it together and set it all up, I was using about five per cent of what I’d bought,” he said.

“I thought, if it’s that difficult and there’s not that much competition, I could probably re-sell that. There weren’t a lot of players in the market then.”

Now, providing secure data storage is a key part of C4L’s work in providing the infrastructure of the internet.

All this is important to companies keen to ensure a good customer experience and to keep their data secure from natural or man-made disasters.

Simon Mewett, chief executive of C4L, says the job of the company is to “feed the addiction” as we all create and consume more data.

The digital ‘universe’ is doubling in size every two years, and by 2020 it is expected to reach 44 zettabytes – or 44million petabytes.

“Consumers are addicted to having more space and greater capacity,” said Mr Mewett.

“That’s why we put so much capacity into the network.”