Ultraspeed UK

Performance hosting for short-term, high volume marketing campaigns

Ultraspeed launches Infected web hosting platform – geared for short-term, high volume marketing campaigns with no minimum contract.

Research shows rival web hosters are failing to understand needs of marketers

Dedicated hosting solutions provider Ultraspeed has today launched its Infected web hosting platform – a failsafe solution, designed specifically for the high traffic volumes and short term nature of online marketing campaigns. Infected takes its name from the increasing popularity of viral marketing and is already being used by the British Heart Foundation for its Food4Thought campaign, aimed at children to encourage them to eat healthily, as well as by the Hoxton Hotel for its £1 a room sale and Cosmos Holidays.

The platform itself is based on Ultraspeed’s robust ‘diskless’, environmentally-friendly server offering which is used by more than 50 companies across the UK and guarantees 100% uptime. The Infected platform is available on a cost effective, week by week basis, and can be specified to handle up to 100,000 simultaneous connections and peak data rates up to 2 gigabits per second.

David Taylor General Manager of the Hoxton Hotel explains the benefits of using the platform:

“The Infected platform was pivotal to the success of our recent £1 room campaign. This saw us sell 1,000 rooms in just 27 minutes. During that time we were running at 200 simultaneous users per second and our site experienced over 280,000 hits in the 27 minute period. With such huge volumes in such a short space of time, the fact that the website didn’t crash or slow down is a major testament to the strength of Ultraspeed’s technology.”

Paul Giles, Online Manager at the British Heart Foundation adds:

“The Food4Thought campaign aims to get children thinking about the foods they eat and encourages them to make informed food choices. During the first two weeks the campaign has run, the website attracted over half a million visits, with over 390,000 in the first week, with traffic highly concentrated between 3.30 to 5pm to coincide with the end of school. We are pleased the robustness of the Infected platform and Ultraspeed’s account management which tailored the solution to fit our needs.”

The launch comes at a time when research shows a majority of hosting providers fail to understand the unique requirements of short term, high intensity marketing campaigns and / or have no interest in trying to do so. Independently, 13 of the UK’s leading providers were subject to a ‘mystery shopping’ exercise and asked to generate a specific proposal for a hosting solution based on the scenario of a micro site needing to be set up with a game download that could be expected to generate 500,000 hits per month over a period of three months.

Of the 13 companies quizzed, just 2 out of the 13 provided a bespoke response, a further 6 referred the respondent to a web page or a short text email and 3 provided a detailed document that wasn’t specific to the project in question – 2 declined to respond at all. Only 2 out of the 13 had offerings judged to be capable of handling the traffic volumes and included the redundancy requested. The findings also revealed that the standard terms of business of most dictated a minimum 12 month contract. Whilst the research suggests that some companies will be paying far more than they need to for a properly specified solution, the most serious issue is that some may have entered into contracts for a totally inadequate solution which may compromise the entire campaign.

Jordan Gross, Managing Director of Ultraspeed comments:

“Until now many marketers have been sold generic solutions more suited to day to day business requirements rather than the demanding environment of high volume campaigns. It’s a ‘square peg in a round hole’ approach that places the entire campaign in jeopardy. Given the thousands, and often millions of pounds invested in cross media campaigns, why would you risk it on a second class hosting solution? The Infected platform aims to be radically different from current offerings and gives marketers the assurance that no matter how many visitors or downloads their web campaign attracts, it will be able to handle the volume.”

Packages for the Infected platform start at £1,055 with no minimum contract and are available now. More details available at www.infected.co.uk

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