With cost-cutting being a primary concern for business owners in the UK, one used car retailer has managed to save 75% month on month, after taking on ServerSpace as its hosting and connectivity provider.
CarShop operates a website that lets customers compare thousands of competitively priced quality cars and hundreds of vans.
As an online retailer of high-value items, any downtime could cost large sums of money. So, when CarShop decided to re-launch its website in May 2011, it was essential its website infrastructure was highly resilient and fault tolerant.
David Allsopp, head of IT at CarShop, said: "We discounted internal hosting for such a big project and so our requirement was to find the best available technical solution with expert technical support."
CarShop required a mixture of cloud server solutions and a live environment requiring zero downtime built on physical architecture, all of which SeverSpace provided.
Tim Pat Dufficy, managing director of ServerSpace, said: "We proposed a robust infrastructure design for hosting their online retailing website, and advised them what they needed at a price significantly more competitive than other providers.
"We demonstrated we had adequate reference clients with demanding web sites and assured them we would provide an excellent level of customer service."
For CarShop, SeverSpace created a bespoke service of a hybrid hosting solution combined physical servers and cloud servers, as well as a fully-managed network of firewalls, switches and load balancers.
The full environment went live in October 2011, with no single point of failure. CarShop also benefited from support from a friendly team.
"The ServerSpace solution had to be technically fast and robust and this was a key reason for selection. We were also attracted to the concept of intentionally deep and wide support skills. This was something that was always going to be a necessity as we set our applications up," said Allsopp.
"Furthermore, we have comparisons with historic solutions that show we have made 75 per cent saving month on month, with no reduction in quality of service."
