That thing called 'uptime'

New media company Prezence develops and designs Web sites for the likes of Ster-Kinekor, Sony BMG, eTV and EMI Africa. Headquartered in the UK, Prezence established a South African office in Cape Town in 2002 to service the European market.

"It was very informal at first," says Prezence SA MD Tim Bishop, of the company's first forays into the local Web hosting market.

"I asked the staff whether anyone knew a local hosting company. One of the guys recommended Hetzner. We used them for the Entertainment Africa portal, and as we did more things, we stuck with them. It was a 'better the devil you know' type thing.

"As hosting became more mission-critical and we started doing bigger sites, working with the biggest brands in SA in the entertainment and movies spheres, it became a need for reliable, fast, affordable hosting," he says.

Hetzner hosts about 20 servers on behalf of Prezence clients, with other servers being hosted in-house by the clients themselves.

"It's been a great partnership," says Bishop. "It's a one-way partnership: we pay them money, they don't pay us. But what they give us in return means everything's covered all the time. Should there be any glitches or potential upcoming failures, they're on the phone [to us]. We're dealing with companies in the UK, but they don't care. You're just another number. The personal experience with Hetzner is amazing as they make us feel like we're their only client."

While price was initially a factor in Prezence's ongoing relationship with Hetzner, Bishop says this is no longer the case. "That they're reliable, fast, and proactive is far more important to us now [than price]. We're considered the leading new media company in SA. But it doesn't matter what we built, or how good it is, it's useless without that which it sits on, and that's Hetzner. We won a construction award for the sterkinekor.com site at the Design Indaba. How beautiful and functional it is doesn't matter if you don't have the right people or if the servers and infrastructure aren't 100%, and that's what Hetzner is. They put the reliability in our skill.

"We talk a big game," Bishop notes, "saying we are number one. When sites go down, clients come knocking on our door. But sites don't go down because we're on Hetzner. Some of the stuff we do is hosted on client servers but where clients ask us to do the hosting or to recommend a company, we always pass them on to Hetzner."

Regarding how, exactly, it manages to meet Prezence's and its customers' uptime requirements, Hetzner MD Hans Wencke says: "Firstly, we ensure we have sufficient capacity on our connections into Verizon. For example, the Ster-Kinekor site is hosted in our Johannesburg data centre, where our connection sits between 40% and 50% utilisation. Should this reach 70% utilisation, we will increase the capacity of the link. We also ensure there is no internal congestion on our network.

"Hetzner also runs redundant network links into Verizon's core network, connecting to two independent routers on our side as well as Verizon's, with automatic failover mechanisms installed in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. We also have UPS and generator backup in the event of a power failure.

"With particular clients that have resource-intensive Web sites due to high traffic volumes (eg, Ster-Kinekor) at a server level, Hetzner operates a server cluster," he says. "This means that the load generated is spread across multiple servers. The load balancing server clusters also facilitate a very quick failover mechanism in the event of a server failure. The databases driving these sites are replicated to another server, which again facilitates a speedy failover mechanism. Hetzner also maintains spare equipment on site to replace equipment that might turn faulty."

"It is quite simple," concludes Bishop. "Hetzner delivers great service to us. It is technically superior, the service is fast and reliable, and downtime is negligible. It is so much better than any other experiences we've had as a worldwide company. Hetzner puts the European companies to shame."

Most companies would willingly pay large amounts of money to customers for an endorsement like that, which just goes to show that, once again, service is ultimately where the key to customer loyalty lies.