Achieving Scalable, Highly Available Hosting
Since 1995, Imagitech has helped millions of drivers pass their theory tests and improve the safety of our roads. Their test-preparation and risk-assessment software is utilised by both learners and occupational drivers in the UK, Ireland and South Africa.
With an award-winning portfolio and a customer focused approach, Imagitech has experienced huge demand for their tailor-made software solutions. Their software has topped the sales charts on Amazon and their rapidly growing user-base and client list includes Britannia, Canada Life, CITB, Focus Multimedia, Prometric, Daiichi Sankyo and the AA.
Imagitech had previously been hosting their platform on a single dedicated server but as the business expanded, they upgraded to a larger dedicated server with more resource. As growth continued and with more customers coming on board, running operations from one server – a single point of failure – became riskier and Imagitech decided it was time to look into a new, more robust hosting solution.
The team knew they needed a solution that could grow easily alongside their business, and one with some degree of fault tolerance. They also required a system with SQL and web servers separated. Imagitech reached out to hosting providers for competitive quotes.
Secura presented a solution designed around Imagitech’s desired functionality and specifications, with live usage data from their current server to provide an accurate representation of their current platform. This tailored approach based on real-life usage, delivered a considered platform design that fitted the business’s current needs, with no wasted resource allocation other than the initial agreed growth headroom – which in turn created a competitive price point for Imagitech.
The on-going growth Imagitech sought is baked into the Virtual Private Cloud, allowing resources to scale seamlessly and in a granular fashion, so they can add more CPU, RAM and storage resource as and when they need it – without any new hardware purchase.
Mike Bews, Imagitech Managing Director:
“Once the quotes were in, we found ourselves in the unusual position of not needing to play off price against quality. Not only was the Secura proposal easily the best thought through option from a performance and resilience perspective, it was also the best value for money of the quotes we had. As a result, choosing Secura as our hosting provider was one of the easiest business–purchase decisions I’ve made in 25 years.”
Migrating your services from one hosting provider to another can be a daunting prospect for any business. At Secura, we approach every migration in the same way; customer-focused and consultative, no matter the size of your business or workloads.
The Secura team worked with Imagitech to thoroughly understand their business and applications in order to create a tailored migration plan and a process that runs as efficiently and smoothly as possible. After working with Imagitech to create and agree on a detailed migration plan and schedule, the migration itself was then largely completed by Secura.
Mike Bews commented:
“In every previous server move I’ve managed, the handover of the new server comprised a sheet of paper listing IP addresses/machine names and initial passwords – and then we were effectively on our own…migration was our problem.
The experience with Secura was very different: Secura took an active, leading role in assisting with the migration, getting us to the point of having a working system running parallel to the old, in readiness for DNS cutover. The end result was minimal disruption to normal operations, zero inconvenience for our customers and a totally successful migration, completed at the planned time – with Secura doing the majority of the heavy lifting.”
Secura delivered a system comprising of a pair of virtual web servers and SQL servers sat behind a firewall and load balancer, at the price point Imagitech had been looking for. Imagitech now benefit not only from the redundancy designed into their platform but like all customer solutions on Secura’s VPC, from the virtual machine (VM) high availability offered by VMware vSphere.
This failover of virtual machines is standard on the Secura VPC and means that if a physical host within the VPC develops an issue, affected VMs are restored automatically on a different host, protecting workloads from disruption caused by hardware failure.
At Secura, our focus on customer support is what really makes us stand out as a provider, and we think it is one of the reasons our customers love working with us.
Imagitech now benefit from Secura’s experienced UK-based service desk team, who are available to deliver technical help and expertise 24x7x365. Our commitment to responsive customer support gives Imagitech the peace of mind that should any issue or request arise, Secura will be there to help.
Mike Bews said:
“We are now 3 years into our relationship with Secura and in that time, the technical solution has remained 100% robust. I cannot recall any downtime, for any cause and that includes updates to Secura’s own infrastructure, updates to our own solution and to the operating systems and server software that hosts our solution.
We’ve had occasional problems, of course, but Secura’s excellent support team have always gone beyond the call of duty, to ensure any questions we’ve had are answered and any issues we have raised, are quickly resolved.”
Virtual Private Cloud
The Virtual Private Cloud provides Imagitech with a highly flexible solution, allowing for resources to scale seamlessly and in a granular fashion.
Zero Downtime
Since the migration, Imagitech has experienced a grand total of zero downtime.
The team at Secura listened carefully to what Imagitech wanted their new platform to deliver, to ensure the solution matched their requirements and supported their objective of expansion into the SaaS model of application delivery.
The team at Secura listened carefully to what Imagitech wanted their new platform to deliver, to ensure the solution matched their requirements.
Imagitech found Secura’s proposal not only met their performance specifications, but was also the best value for money.
Secura’s round-the-clock support team ensure any issues or questions Imagitech have are dealt with quickly and effectively.
Download the Secura and Imagitech case study in PDF format.
