Cloud Hosting Journal on Ulitzer

Bluhalo has chosen DediPower's managed hosting solution to create a private cloud, spanning USA to Europe, capable of delivering greater capacity, performance and availability at a lower cost; across its entire portfolio of high-profile websites including BlackBerry, Liverpool F.C., Sky, Sony and NFL UK.

The new solution will also help shape Bluhalo's go to market strategy. According to Managing Director, Spencer Gallagher, "The private cloud strengthens our market position by making our services more agile, efficient and scaleable. This enables us to continue to target even higher- traffic clients with richer-featured sites at highly competitive costs, allowing us to expand our business into new strategic areas."

Bluhalo specified DediPower's leading edge virtualisation solution following an extensive review of its existing managed multi-server hosting system; which was proving increasingly inflexible and expensive to run. With its more powerful, responsive, and efficient platform, DediPower has already helped the company boost capacity and achieve significant cost savings.

Simon Green, Head of IT at Bluhalo comments, "DediPower not only provides access to the large scale, high performance servers required to deliver our private cloud but also the customer support and operational flexibility that is central to our requirement. DediPower's response and delivery is excellent - they react quickly to requests and handle system changes without lengthy processes. Consequently, sites can go-live at very short notice, which is vital for many of our projects."

He adds, "Scaleability is also crucial for our business. While all sites experience demand peaks and troughs traffic on our broadcast, consumer brand and sporting sites can go through the ceiling, particularly during specific promotions or events. In the past, we had to set-up additional server capacity to accommodate these fluctuations, which incurred even higher costs. With DediPower's virtualisation solution, our sites use our private cloud to access dedicated capacity on demand, instantly - no matter how large their requirement is. This alone represents tremendous cost savings for our business."

As the UK's leading developer of sites for sporting organisations, Bluhalo builds digital presence around some of the country's most popular sports events. Prime football sites have been among the first to feedback on DediPower's improved hosting performance. Tottenham Hotspur, for example , can now handle four times as much traffic as it did before, while NFL UK, which, at times, struggled to cope with web demand during matches, can now accommodate peak traffic easily.

Craig Martin, CEO DediPower Managed Hosting states, "We are delighted to help Bluhalo reduce its operational costs and experience a better service for themselves and their customers. Bluhalo is perfect for virtualised managed hosting - they are unusually good at what they do and demonstrate exceptional technical as well as creative innovation. They run tidy and efficient applications that utilise cloud clusters to best effect; this has allowed our platform to deliver optimum performance at a fraction of the cost of their previous system."