Xen solution meets e-commerce demand
Rapid Web provides specialist internet services including Website Design, E-Commerce Development and Search Engine Optimisation for a range of clients including E-Commerce sites wishing to maximise their on-line sales.
ForLinux have been working with Rapid Web, a digital web agency based in Staffordshire, since 2003. Rapid Web’s solution includes several Fully supported, managed, Dedicated Linux Web and database servers. Ashley Peake, Technical Director at Rapid Web explains how working with ForLinux has benefited the company and their clients.
Partnership
“We have been using ForLinux to support our Web servers for a number of years now, this has enabled us to keep control of our hosting directly so we can offer our clients the best possible service but at the same time having the reassurance knowing that if something was to go wrong we would have someone working on the problem almost instantly.”
Rapid Web began working with 8Ball when the company launched their first website and have supported their continued E-Commerce development over a number of years. The website has seen fantastic growth; 8Ball.co.uk is now one of the UK’s largest on-line t-shirt distributors with an impressive 10,000+ items in their on-line catalogue.
8 Ball’s server requirements have steadily increased as their business has continued to grow and it quickly became apparent that their existing server solution would need expanding to cope with the high volumes of traffic the site was attracting. However, being unable to anticipate the extent of the future demand, 8Ball needed a flexible solution that would be able to grow with them rather than having to continually change their server architecture or pay for a large solution with potentially redundant capacity.
Scalable solution
ForLinux assisted Rapid Web in re-engineering the server solution for 8ball.co.uk in the run up to Christmas 2009. With the growth in traffic that 8ball.co.uk had been experienced through 2009, it was clear that traffic was going to peak and a more robust solution was needed.
“We moved 8Ball’s website onto a Xen server platform after extensive research and testing. We looked at many other options including VMware based hosting but yet again ForLinux’s solution was the most cost effective and reliable.”
ForLinux provided and implemented a solution comprising of a Managed Xen Web server and a MySQL Database server. The new solution was initially the same specification as their previous server set up, however as the new solution was built on a Xen platform, it would allow additional resources to be added and/or removed when required.
Implementation
“One night in December around 10pm I had a SMS warning me that the 8ball website was seeing slow loading times, after checking the server load and memory usage I called ForLinux and requested more CPU & Memory resources to be allocated. Within 5 minutes the server was back up and running at full speed with the additional resources.”
The ForLinux and Rapid Web Monitoring System flagged up an issue with 8Balls web server struggling to cope with very high levels of traffic. With a single phone call to ForLinux, Rapid Web requested additional RAM and CPU resources to be made available to the machine. The on-call ForLinux technician was able to apply the resources and with a reboot of the server, the machine was scaled up and able to cope with the high traffic demands of 8Balls busiest Christmas yet!
“A lot of hosting companies talk about 99.999% SLA, this means nothing if their support fails to deliver but with ForLinux’s support you know you’re in good hands. I’ve just checked one of our older servers that’s due to be replaced this year, it’s uptime is 902 Days! Needless to say ForLinux will be handling the upgrade.” Ashley Peake, Technical Director, Rapid Web Ltd
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