IRT Surveys' seamless transition to UKFast

Moving to a UKFast dedicated platform, IRT Surveys benefited from:

• Immediate server support 24/7 within three rings
• A reliable website with 100% uptime
• Access to all aspects of the server solution

As an energy-monitoring project, which operates online in its entirety, and caters for the whole globe, IRT Surveys requires a smooth, reliable service with the capacity to run its revolutionary software.

"We created an ecommerce energy bureau where anybody from around the world can upload infrared pictures of their houses and we calculate their energy usage," reveals John Hall of IRT Surveys. "Our innovative software analyses how much damage is being done to the environment appealing to an ever more energy conscious society - the project has been very successful and as such needs a reliable base from which to run."

Host to host: the seamless transition

Many organisations worry about the effect that moving their hosting will have on their business. Others are concerned at how much time and energy it will take or simply cannot be bothered with changing. What IRT Surveys discovered with UKFast was a completely hassle-free transition which was incredibly beneficial for their business.

"Our transition to UKFast was incredibly easy and dispelled all our worries about moving to a new host. UKFast navigated all hurdles seamlessly so there were no problems with downtime and their deployment and support teams were great. We were hand held through the process, advised where necessary and we can literally phone up the experts and ask them a question within seconds," says John.

UKFast's specialist deployment team guides new clients through their solution set-up. This aspect of the UKFast service means experts are well-placed to answer any questions which may arise. Also during this setup period new clients are introduced to their dedicated account manager who becomes the main point of contact at UKFast.

The importance of a strong web presence

IRT Surveys migrated from a shared hosting solution with their previous provider, to a dedicated one at UKFast.

"Our web presence is the most important aspect of this project because the entire service is based online," says John. "Running from the internet means we need a good, solid base on which to build and a reliable and quick platform to ensure our service runs smoothly for our users. The UKFast server is much more reliable than our old hosting solution which was shared with other businesses and caused our site to run slowly and suffer from too much downtime."

Shared hosting solutions cause problems for businesses that need to have a constant online presence. Bandwidth is often contended as other websites dominate the resources of the server. Dedicated servers eliminate this problem by providing sole use of the hardware and UKFast also guarantees 100 per cent network uptime with its robust infrastructure located in state-of-the-art data centres and bandwidth aggregated from the world's four major providers.

Complete access to server solutions

Additionally, a dedicated solution allows a level of access which is unavailable from shared hosts. John states, "The dedicated UKFast server allows us complete access which we couldn't achieve on our shared platform and we desperately needed in order to operate our back-end databases."

UKFast provides the MyUKFast control panel, an online portal through which clients can take complete control of their hosting solution. Through the MyUKFast control panel IRT solutions can view and manage their databases, domain names, capacity thresholds and much more to make hosting processes as quick and easy as possible. The client solution belongs to the client and therefore we make it as transparent as possible, providing easy to understand features to analyse traffic, bandwidth usage and proximity to any thresholds. All this ensures the health of the client solution and allows for proactive measures to be taken to leapfrog future challenges.

A world of support

For businesses like IRT Surveys which operate internationally it is imperative that their website is live every second of the day or night. With UKFast's infrastructure network downtime is eliminated, however it is important that a 24/7 company is able to access support any time during the day or night. Support at UKFast is available in-house 24/7/365 without tripping over to call centres or overseas offices after 8pm.

At IRT Surveys, they're delighted with the level of support, saying, "We've chatted with the UKFast tech team and they've been really great - answering straight away and resolving issues very quickly. With other hosts we've been left on hold for many minutes before being attended to. In fact the high level of support and the smooth migration was one of the main reasons for moving to UKFast. Our previous server was a shared platform - it was too slow for us and other residents of the hardware limited our capacity for growth.

"UKFast is much faster, more reliable and the support is just what we need to successfully run the website."