Limited SA bandwidth availability and high cost were proving to be a virtually insurmountable barrier to local Internet solutions provider, [I*]Group until it signed a hosting agreement with internationally renowned managed hosting company, RackSpace.
Explains Marc Seymour, MD of [I*]Group: "The cost of bandwidth requirements at South African rates were running at more than R80 000 per month with the added frustration of certain restrictions on availability. This was proving to be unacceptable to our client-base so we tasked ourselves with finding an international supplier with global reach."
Seymour resorted to "surfing" the Internet to identify a supplier offering managed hosting services and came across the UK-based Rackspace.
"I must admit that in setting out to appoint Rackspace as a managed hosting supplier we had some serious reservations. It was frightening to think that our server, one of the most mission-critical aspects of our business, was not going to be located within easy reach, but more than 10 000km away in London," he said.
"These fears proved to be totally unfounded. Based on Rackspace`s approach to `Fanatical Support` it makes no difference to us where the server is located. It`s just like the box is next door. We have full root access, can decide which software and applications we want to run and bingo, away we go," says Seymour.
"What`s more, we can operate with total confidence in knowing that RackSpace provides 24/7 access to Level 3 technicians and a guaranteed uptime of 100%.
"The Rackspace approach is one of the finest examples of the global Internet at work."
A measure of just how critical the performance, reliability and availability of the [I*]Group`s server and services infrastructure has to be is the extremely high-volume nature of several of their most popular global sites.
One of the sites that [I*]Group manages is called "howhotami.com" - a site where individuals can post their photographs and visitors vote for the top 10 favourites every week.
"CNN picked up on this site and broadcast a short piece on it and the individuals that participate on it. In the next five days, we had over 5 million hits on the site - all run through the London-based RackSpace Linux server. We have had over 150 million impressions on this site in the first year," says Seymour.
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