“As a hotel with a low cost business model, our marketing budget is almost nonexistent. This means that we need to use innovative ways to promote our business and one of the way we do this is by running a £1 room promotion every three months. During this promotion we sell five rooms per day for £1 and five rooms for £29, every day for the next three months. That’s 1000 rooms in all and they all go on sale at a pre-advertised time and date.”
“And that’s where the problem starts. During the sale, for a period of around 30 minutes, we typically get 30,000 unique visitors to the site. This used to cause the server on which we hosted our site very big problems. You could tell when the sale was about to start, even without looking at your watch, as the site would slowly grind to a halt and not really recover for around 15 minutes. You can imagine the frustration that this caused our web site visitors. We were updating our site to try to get the right message to the visitor; however they could not even see our site as the home page would not load!”
“We looked around at the traditional hosting companies, but the search was not initially fruitful as although they understood our problem, they wanted to run us server space by the month. When Ultraspeed came to see us it was obvious that they had the solution that we needed. They could rent us a server for the majority of the time and then for the 24 hour period around the time of the sale, they would expand out, like an accordion, the number of servers that we had available, to satisfy the demands of our £1 room sale.”
“Working with Ultraspeed has been great. They join into our conference call that we have open at the time of the sale, so we get real time stats on how many visitors we are getting. During our last sale we were getting on excess of 22,000 connections per second at the peak and can report that our web site showed no signs of strain.”
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