IET

When the IET, the UK's largest professional association, needed a reliable partner to host their informative web site, the Institution of Engineering and Technology looked to Rackspace.

The IET is the UK’s largest professional association. It represents over 130,000 electrical, electronic, manufacturing and systems engineers and other related sciences. When it needed a reliable partner to host their informative website, the Institution of Engineering and Technology looked to the internet for inspiration.

The IET is one of the world's most influential electrical engineering and IT organisations. It has developed from specialised roots in electrical engineering at the end of the 19th Century and now embraces the many and varied aspects of engineering and information technology in the 21st Century. It is a highly respected, important body that greatly influences both the standards and the essential regulations that govern the industry. You could say it has all the right connections.

Something popped up
Alan Gray is in charge of the Institution’s infrastructure development and discovered his ideal hosting partner through a quick search on Google, “I knew we needed to invest in managed hosting for our increasingly busy site, so I went for a quick browse around and happened upon Rackspace®. The site ticked all the desired boxes identified through previous understanding of hosting providers and I was just thinking of moving to view other options listed from my search when an inoffensive little window popped up and said, “Hello, I’m Jerri, how can I help you today”. I thought this was quite clever, so I had an instant online conversation with this ‘live person’ and I must say I was very impressed with the depth of Jerri’s knowledge and the immediate interest in fulfilling my company’s managed hosting needs.”

Commitment to support
Alan went on to reveal, “I stayed on the site to learn far more about Rackspace and later that month went, with a consultant, to visit the Rackspace secure Data Centre at West Drayton, near Heathrow, followed up with a further visit by myself and the Director of IT, Nick Slowe. The effect of meeting Rackspace sales and service personnel face to face was immediate.”

“I was really impressed with their highly supportive attitude and the total commitment to customer support. As a direct result of my initial site visit and our subsequent tour we signed up to host the Institution’s website with Rackspace and have now maintained that relationship for over 2½ years with absolutely no problems or issues, barring the odd hardware glitch, which are pretty unavoidable, but even these are sorted out without due fuss or excessive waiting time under their unique one hour hardware replacement guarantee. Their aptly named Fanatical Support® has not let us down once during our relationship with the company.”

2 million clicks
“Our total hosting package at Rackspace includes application servers, and database servers as well as full storage and backup facilities. It is vital that our members have complete access to a very wide variety of data including the many training and educational packages available to them, these being in addition to a comprehensive diary of all exhibitions and seminars offered by the institution.” “As a key industry body the IET also offers an online facility to purchase the very latest publications covering building regulations, wiring regulations and signal processing – incredibly important for those companies and individuals wishing to keep abreast of the rules that may well affect the way they conduct business. It is hardly surprising that our website is very busy. In fact the www.theiet.org/ website handles 70,000 hits every day, verifying the significance and importance of the site to everyone associated with the industry”. Alan added, “Even though we’re achieving around 2,000,000 hits every month, I’m delighted to say that Rackspace has maintained a 100% network uptime for the majority of the period.”

Alan’s situation is not unusual. When websites become a critical part of a business or organisation and downtime is not an option, it is essential to develop the right relationship with a trusted hosting partner to ensure that members, customers and, in the case of the IET, the public, has 24-hour access. This is particularly important if a site offers essential information or member support and obviously more so if your business relies on the internet for sales.

For details of the managed hosting services offered by Rackspace please follow Alan’s example and visit www.rackspace.co.uk or call us on 0800 988 0100.

For anything associated with Electrical or Electronic Engineering, don’t hesitate to go to www.theiet.org They made the right connection, so can you.