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Superstoresearch.com

SuperStoreSearch.com is an amazingly vast internet shopping and price comparison site featuring millions of products and services. It offers helpful buyers guides on everything from TVs to washing machines, featuring detailed product catalogues and probably more importantly, the best market price on where to buy the product or service you are looking for, by searching over 500 high street shops and online stores. As you can imagine the processing power and datasets required to run and maintain such an operation are immense. The shopping search database alone features more than 10 million products, which are processed and updated nightly to ensure consumers get the most accurate information prior to a purchase.

Network problems

Junaid Nazir is lead technician at SuperStoreSearch, “Our price engine platform was designed to process enormous amounts of data and as we discovered during our initial setup, the wrong server configurations and inadequate server hardware would lead to an unwieldy site and obstruct fast and stable data operations. We started business life hosting with a company that claimed they could handle the processing power, data and bandwidth required to support our web applications that make the main shopping site fast, efficient and user friendly. We soon discovered that the reality did not live up to expectations, and we experienced some significant network downtime and site availability issues due to hardware limitations and network problems.”

You get what you pay for

Junaid said, “It became very clear that we needed a new hosting partner, but one that could provide some very sophisticated, high specification servers and levels of support that met our particularly demanding requirements. We researched the market and soon discovered Rackspace Hosting®. They had a reputation for quality and support and were regarded by many as a premium hosting service provider. Our experience has been that you certainly get what you pay for, and in the long run hosting with Rackspace has proven to be a far more economical proposition from an uptime and support standpoint than any other offering.”

Marked improvement in performance

Junaid went on to say, “After detailed discussions with the sales team that determined the specification and server requirements we chose Rackspace as our new hosting partner. We transferred our mission critical applications over from the previous dedicated hosting company. Since the migration we've had a marked improvement in performance and network uptime, and the support from the Rackspace team has been absolutely superb. Their claim to provide Fanatical Support® has been visibly and practically demonstrated. We experienced this even at the setting up stage when we were asked to provide details of any special instructions to be carried out as part of emergency procedures; what to do in the event of specific issues, who to contact and more besides... steps which were unheard of with other hosting companies. From the start we felt genuinely reassured that we were being taken care of by a team that had solid experience in the field and knew exactly what they were doing.”

Active monitoring and support

Junaid revealed, “Our contract with Rackspace means that the support team actively monitors and manages the servers and the network. They immediately notify us if they spot anything wrong, whether in our backups, site loading failures or any other technical issues. This is such a difference when compared to the previous hosting arrangements, where none of this happened at all. The result was that a great deal of damage could occur to site infrastructure before we knew anything was amiss.”

Price difference is superficial

Junaid said, “I believe it is commonly assumed that Rackspace has a higher sticker price than many other hosting providers, but in our experience the perceived price differences are only superficial. In real terms, not having reliable and stable server uptime directly translates into significant financial losses for any time that a site is down due to hardware or network failures. With Rackspace we know that hardware will be replaced within an hour, and network uptime is always guaranteed to be 100%. This gives us complete peace of mind because in our business any downtime or non-availability, or even slow loading can have an impact on how the major search engines like Google actually view and index your site. This is because they prefer sites that are very responsive. Extended downtimes can have adverse effects. The same applies to user perceptions. It definitely affects your brand position if your site cannot be accessed due to network problems. You may have the most exciting content and access to the best deals in town, but downtime and site issues will always damage your credibility.”

IT team can focus on business

Junaid summarised, “From my viewpoint, the peace of mind of having a reliable and robust network infrastructure to support your site is immeasurable. And not being wakened in the middle of the night every other week due to a server being down is a big stress relief and it frees up our IT resources to focus on the site and business, rather than being tied up with server problems. For any serious business or organisation that needs totally reliable hosting and a support team you can count on, the choice is clear: Rackspace meets those requirements and exceeds expectations.

Comparison market chooses Rackspace

David Kelly is Managing Director of Rackspace EMEA, “We are very pleased to be the hosting partner of choice for SuperStoreSearch.com. We understand the importance of high quality support and realise just how critical 100% network uptime can be for such data intensive sites. The online comparison business is still growing rapidly and Rackspace has been chosen by many of the leading companies in the market as their hosting partner, underlining the importance of choosing the right hosting provider.

If you are shopping online for a product or service then a visit to www.superstoresearch.com will point you in the right direction at the right price. If you need hosting for data intensive applications or are thinking of venturing into the clouds then the first choice has to be Rackspace. For more information please call us on 0800 988 0100 or visit the website at www.rackspace.co.uk