Maginus launch Retail Hosting

All retailers experience significant peaks and troughs in their business. One of their key challenges is providing sufficient server capacity and bandwidth to deal with the peaks, without incurring unnecessary cost when business is slower. Retail-Hosting offers a solution in the form of flexible, affordable hosting services. Retailers can configure a hosting service for a typical workload (such as an average number of e-commerce transactions through their website), but should business suddenly increase the service will flex automatically to cope. Retail-Hosting clients only pay for the resources they actually use.

“Running an effective server infrastructure can be extremely costly and time-consuming, distracting a retailer from its core business,” said Simon Dunleavy, Director of Managed Services at Retail-Hosting. “But it’s necessary because retailers are under more pressure than ever to provide a fast and reliable service to their customers. Slow server response or downtime on an e-commerce website can result in a lost sale. Failure in a back office system, that’s being used to fulfil a customer order, can result in a customer being lost for good. We’ve designed Retail-Hosting to give retailers an affordable, reliable and flexible way to have this key part of their business taken care of.”

A range of flexible hosting packages

Retail-Hosting offers standard hosting packages for typical retail requirements. These range from the hosting of corporate websites and low-volume e-commerce sites, to online stores that process very high transaction volumes.

Also available are custom hosting packages, tailored to a retailer’s specific requirements. These can include hosting for ERP, email and office applications, using servers at Retail-Hosting’s data centre; ‘colocation’ hosting services, where a retailer’s servers are moved to the data centre and managed by Retail-Hosting there; hardware-provided services, where Retail-Hosting provides server hardware to a customer on a lease or sale basis; and supporting services, such as secure remote backup.

State-of-the-art data centre

Customers’ websites and applications are hosted at a state-of-the-art data centre with exceptional resilience and security, and managed by professional qualified engineers. The facility features extensive redundancy in connectivity and power supply, as well as multiple layers of physical and virtual security. It also makes extensive use of server virtualisation technology in order to flex the computing and bandwidth resources needed to support a retailer’s changing business requirement.

Retail-Hosting can host a wide range of applications on Microsoft and Solaris platforms, including all Microsoft operating systems, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, the Microsoft Office suite and Oracle. Retail-Hosting technicians are certified on Microsoft, Solaris and VMware applications.

Fully managed services

Retail-Hosting services are fully managed, which lets retailers focus on generating revenue and keeping customers happy instead of running and maintaining their server infrastructure. The managed service includes:

• Administration and maintenance – server capacity planning, bandwidth monitoring and all day-to-day administration and maintenance activities.
• Monitoring – hosted websites and applications are monitored from three separate POP3 locations, with HTTP and HTTPS availability checks every ten minutes, and an experienced support team is automatically notified about availability status by email and SMS.
• Backups – hosted applications and data are backed up daily and retained for 7 days. Additional backups can also be provided if required – for example, as server snapshots for building temporary test servers, or for risk management during code change projects.

Retail-Hosting provides detailed SLAs for each customer, with guaranteed uptime and a compensation system should the terms of the SLA not be met.