Leading mobile web technology provider uses Hostway to accelerate reliability and scalability

July 1, 2009; 06:10 AM

The Challenge

Wapple currently has customers in 110 countries and sees traffic to its sites from over 170 countries. The company was previously using a purely UK-based hosting provider, and was facing a number of challenges with its mobile website hosting arrangements. The primary issue was Wapple’s growth rate; the company was gaining too many customers in too many regions for a purely UK-based hosting company to keep up with. Furthermore, with customers such as MTV and Vodafone, Wapple server traffic could grow exponentially within minutes.

As a result of this, the team found that it could not guarantee 100% uptime on its mobile websites and began to look for a hosting provider which could cope with this growth across the globe and offer a high speed of service no matter the time or place. Wapple’s current hosting company could also take days to build and deploy new servers, and the team was keen to find an alternative provider which could scale up their hosting infrastructure within hours in order to cope with fast-growing traffic to mobile websites. 

“As a company serving a global customer base, we’re all on call 24/7,” said Paul Rhodes, senior web developer, Wapple. “Customers in the US would typically call in with technical problems around midnight, which meant a lot of lost sleep for us. Although we could always resolve these issues quickly, we needed a hosting provider which could cope with different time zones and could offer a higher level of reliability and scalability to stop customers having to call us in the first place.”

The Wapple team also wanted to switch from a Windows to a Linux hosting environment, and needed a hosting provider which could support this migration. Consequently, Wapple decided to invite a number of hosting companies to tender.

The Solution

“We invited a number of companies to tender, but Hostway was one of only two companies to suggest using virtualised servers,” continued Rhodes. “Virtualised servers are more resilient and scalable than traditional servers, so the idea seemed like a no-brainer. Hostway’s quote was also very similar to what we were previously paying, but we would be getting much, much more for our money.”

Wapple chose dual web servers, which are load balanced and protected by a firewall to keep all of the content secure. The company is also using a clustered database with storage on Hostway’s SAN. The entire web infrastructure is backed up to a remote datacentre in Hannover.

The Benefits

Hostway has datacentres and operations across the globe, so it can handle enquiries and offer support at any time of day or night, which means that the team has fewer hours of lost sleep. Hostway also supported the migration to a Linux environment and despite the complexities of handling changing content and retaining domain names between the two hosts, there were no problems reported by either Wapple or any customers. Furthermore, by switching to virtualised servers, the Wapple team can scale up or down their hosting arrangements within hours rather than days, allowing them to respond to customer demand much faster.

Wapple has also implemented more advanced backup procedures. A virtualised server can be copied across to another server much faster than was previously possible, and can be restored from a backup copy within hours, rather than the days necessary to rebuild a physical server. The organisation stores a new image every day for two weeks, so that it has a number of images to fall back on if there are ever any problems.

Wapple is also using Hostway’s server monitoring tools, allowing staff to access CPU temperature, bandwidth usage and number of queries from their desktops. This allows the technicians to justify spending for more bandwidth or processing power, because they can quantify how much traffic the servers are seeing. In future, Wapple is considering using Hostway’s Content Delivery Network to deliver content faster to users around the globe.