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Souq.com

Souq.com is the largest e-commerce site in the Arab world covering Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, and still expanding into new markets. The website was established in 2005 and is an immensely popular online marketplace, where thousands of buyers and sellers in the region congregate on a daily basis to market their goods or purchase products. Souq.com uses a tried and trusted platform that offers various local payment options as well as integrated delivery methods specifically designed for the markets that are served.

Middle East Marketplace Online With Rackspace

Souq.com is the largest e-commerce site in the Arab world covering Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, and still expanding into new markets. The website was established in 2005 and is an immensely popular online marketplace, where thousands of buyers and sellers in the region congregate on a daily basis to market their goods or purchase products. Souq.com uses a tried and trusted platform that offers various local payment options as well as integrated delivery methods specifically designed for the markets that are served.

Arab world ecommerce pioneers
Wisam Daoud is the Chief Technology Officer at Souq.com. “We have been pioneering the field of e-commerce in the Arab World to offer our users a reliable, safe, easy and fun place to conduct their business. We started out as the first online auction site in the UAE and quickly evolved into a fully integrated e-commerce site offering fixed price options and branded online stores, all protected by the highly respected Souq SafePay secure payment system.”

Customers expect superior service
Wisam continued, “Making sure the site is always available is a critical part of our offering. We have used several web hosting providers since start up. We tried a number of partners in the US, UK, and even in Singapore to ensure that we have the lowest latency to our core markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It is fair to say that the providers were reasonably satisfactory for most of the time, but this is really as good as saying they are bad in the internet industry! Our customers expect superior service from us, and our hosting provider is a core component in our business to ensure we consistently provide that top level experience. The key factor for us was that any outage or below average response, even in crisis situations, can cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and do incalculable harm to the hard won relationship with our customers.”

Everyone has heard of Rackspace!
Wisam added, “This is why we studied the market carefully and selected the most experienced, most supportive hosting partner we could find. Rackspace® Hosting proved to be the perfect partner for Souq.com.” When asked how he discovered Rackspace, Wisam replied, “Everyone in the internet business has heard of Rackspace, they are an internet legend, though trying to recall when I first heard of the company is like trying to remember when I first learned about Santa Claus!”

Quality, service and reputation
Wisam revealed, “The selection of Rackspace as our hosting partner has been utterly vindicated. They offer genuine Fanatical Support®, which means real, genuine, level III, techno savvy people being available 24/7, simply a phone call away on every continent. We don’t have to put up with impersonal Interactive Voice Response systems, or those lame messages telling you ‘how much we care’ before disconnecting and leaving you with the same problem you started with! The reality in today’s market is that you have to pay for quality service and reputation. Rackspace is not a cheap provider, but you definitely get your money’s worth. They are particularly strong in the Middle East, where we enjoy extremely low latency hosting out of the United Kingdom data centre for all our sites. The only alternative would be to host with local ISPs in every country. This would be a technical and logistical nightmare, and result in unimaginable overheads and additional cost.”

A good night’s sleep
Wissam summarised, “Rackspace has the global experience, resource and level of service and uptime guarantees that enable us to sleep very well at night. I know that our servers are always being monitored for any untoward happening, and as a result we are able to maintain a smaller infrastructure management team than would otherwise be the case. Rackspace manages our servers, firewall, load balancer, database, caching and storage. We are also investigating new hybrid cloud products with Rackspace to help with our total cost of ownership; instantly scalable cloud servers would remove the need to have spare dedicated servers on standby in case of traffic spikes or excessive load demand. I can see Hybrid Hosting being another first in the area, allowing us to combine security with instant scalability”.

Middle East hosting partner
Wissam concluded, “I would fully recommend Rackspace as a hosting partner in the Middle East. Their support is truly fanatical and the standard of service response and guaranteed uptime is the ideal basis on which to build a phenomenal business like Souq.com.”

Visit Souq.com
If you are looking for a guided tour around a bustling, thriving online marketplace, then a visit to www.souq.com is highly recommended.

Unmatched support
If your business needs a professional hosting for a web presence in the Middle East, with guaranteed levels of performance and unmatched technical support, then please visit www.Rackspace.ae. Alternatively, please call us for FREE hosting advice on 8000440578.