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CarShop is the UK’s leading used car retailer. In addition to four locations across the UK in Cardiff, Swindon, Northampton and Doncaster, the company operates a user-friendly 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 the 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, says: “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.”
COST-EFFECTIVE HOSTING
CarShop researched several providers with a challenging list of requirements including a mixture of cloud server solutions and a live environment requiring zero downtime built on physical architecture. The company also required a highly reactive support resource in the early stages of implementation as new applications were developed and tested.
Following an initial consultation period, CarShop selected ServerSpace as its chosen supplier. ServerSpace has a reputation for providing high quality, cost-effective hosting and connectivity services, backed by outstanding customer service.
Tim Pat Dufficy, managing director of ServerSpace, says: “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.”
HIGHEST LEVELS OF SECURITY
ServerSpace’s complex hosting packages are designed according to customers’ project requirements. Customers are able to draw on the experience of its highly skilled technical architects to put together a solution that offers the highest levels of security, monitoring and availability backed by first-class SLAs.
For CarShop, the hybrid hosting solution combined physical servers and cloud servers, as well as a fully-managed network of firewalls, switches and load balancers.
Linux cloud servers were used for development and quality assurance. CarShop also commissioned multiple physical servers for the website and database servers. These were fronted by twin firewalls and load balancers.
A key feature is the provision of a CDN solution which greatly enhances performance of the website.
Allsopp says: “There are two clear features to the ServerSpace solution. First, the hosting technology is extremely fast and robust, so we have zero issues with redundancy and security.
“The second feature is the quality, speed and depth of knowledge of the support staff, particularly over the first few weeks of implementation.”
The design ensured that the environment was both scalable and fault tolerant, delivered on state-of-the-art equipment from one of ServerSpace’s Tier 3 London data centres.
FIRST-CLASS SUPPORT
The full environment went live in October 2011, with no single point of failure, guaranteed resiliency and redundancy to avoid outages. CarShop also benefited from first-class support from a friendly team who really understood their needs.
“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,” says 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.”
Impressed by the cost-effectiveness of ServerSpace’s solutions and its highly experienced and talented team of engineers, CarShop has recently placed orders for additional cloud servers to slot in to its IT environment, ensuring the company remains running at maximum efficiency 24/7.
