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Case Study : That thing called Uptime |
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
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Uptime is king in the new media game, where downtime is lethal and competition fierce. A new Cape-based media company has put all of its eggs in one hoster´s basket and is smiling all the way.
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.” |
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Source : IT Web
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