Managed hosting supports organic lifestyle, natural beauty and cleaning products manufacturer’s e-commerce growth

Managed hosting supports organic lifestyle, natural beauty and cleaning products manufacturer’s e-commerce growth

Organic lifestyle, natural beauty and cleaning products manufacturer BigGreenSmile.com was delighted when a successful promotion of its shower timers on breakfast television generated a surge of traffic to its website.

However, the sudden increase in hits meant their internal server was unable to cope with demand, and the site crashed. This not only had a negative impact on potential sales, but also highlighted that existing web hosting provision was not adequate to support future company growth.

Small company, big solution

“Although we are a small company, we knew we needed a solution that was plenty big enough not only for our current but also future needs, what with plans for an increased product range and other promotional activity,” said BigGreenSmile director, Alasdair Cox. As a small-to-midsized retailer entering the world of managed hosting for the first time, BigGreenSmile needed 24-hour support – a service that seemed to be increasingly hard to come by at reasonable price when it was researching potential suppliers.

After speaking to a number of hosting companies, the company eventually chose to work with Ultraspeed, who gave them a dedicated engineer contact, and also shared the same socially responsible ethos. “Ultraspeed have various systems in place to reduce electricity usage, they recycle and take a very ethical approach to everything they do. This fitted in nicely with what we believe in,” explained Cox.

Supporting online growth

The managed hosting capability is now supporting BigGreenSmile’s growth. “We needed a hosting solution that could cope with increased traffic in future, and that wouldn’t allow our website to crash if we did another successful promotion like the one on ITV,” Cox said. “We also needed technical help, sometimes at strange times and on issues not necessarily related to hosting – we knew this was a big ask but, as we don’t have an in-house team, we wanted to work with someone who was on hand for consultative advice on tweaks that could potentially affect the user experience.”

Since BigGreenSmile switched to managed hosting through Ultraspeed, its website has never crashed, despite periods of high demand such as Christmas or following successful advertising campaigns and promotions. “We also know we have scalability so that if we do suddenly need more storage, it’s there, and we don’t need to worry about our website crashing suddenly. For any e-commerce business, that peace of mind is invaluable,” Cox added.