The unprecedented levels of traffic visiting the site meant its creator Tom Smith, also director of Designed4hits, a leading advertising and design agency in the North West, needed extra bandwidth and additional server space on tap. Rackspace stepped up to the challenge, building a new server on the spot and providing flexible bandwidth to meet peaks in the site as word spread about the online petition.
Smith comments: "We faced a tight time frame. We had to get the site built and live with people signing up as soon as possible in order for the petition to have the impact it`s had. Once live, traffic just kept increasing. We needed more capacity. If the site wasn`t accessible then there would have been no way to collect the signatures."
Smith continues: "Ensuring uptime became our key priority. Rackspace has a reputation for Fanatical Support and we didn`t hesitate to turn to them for help. In order to build and design the site we dropped everything so it could be done in 24 hours. We wanted a company that was as passionate about its hosting as we are about football. That way we could be sure the site was in safe hands."
Dominic Monkhouse, managing director of Rackspace Managed Hosting Europe, comments: "Everyone at Rackspace is passionate. As well as being obsessed with hosting, everyone we employ has to have a passion outside of work, whether it`s supporting a football team or skydiving. This is why we understand fanatical support so well. Where there`s passion people see results. Thanks to Liverpool`s dedicated fans the club is now able to defend its title in the Champions League next year. It`s great that this combined effort helped them back into the competition."
Rackspace Managed Hosting is the fastest growing hosting specialist offering the world`s only self-healing network, delivering 100% network availability. Founded in 1998, Rackspace offers a wide range of managed services for enterprise hosting platforms that are business revenue critical. The company has received numerous awards for its brand of customer service known as Fanatical Support including the Unisys Management 2004 Service Excellence Award for Small Business. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.za or call 0800 085 3973.
Sky News
Sky News is the UK`s most popular 24-hour news channel. Founded in 1989, it is consistently the first place to turn for breaking news. The channel was awarded a BAFTA in 2002, 2003 and was named `News Channel of The Year` by the Royal Television Society (RTS) for the fourth consecutive year in 2005.
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