Company partners with Hostway to cope with its growth across the globe and to offer high speed of service.

Wapple, a developer of mobile internet sites, today announced that it is using Hostway's server monitoring tools, allowing its staff to access CPU temperature, bandwidth usage and number of queries from their desktops. According to the company, this allows the technicians to justify spending for more bandwidth or processing power, because they can quantify how much traffic the servers are seeing.


The company claims that currently it has customers in 110 countries and sees traffic to its sites from over 170 countries. It further explains that it 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 its 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, says the company.

It avers that as a result of this problem, 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. It says that its 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.

The company further adds that they also wanted to switch from a Windows to a Linux hosting environment, and needed a hosting provider which could support this migration.

''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.''

"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."

The company further adds that in future, they will consider using Hostway's Content Delivery Network to deliver content faster to users around the globe.