Leading British hosting firm UKFast today announces a five-year partnership with LateRooms.com to support the development of the popular online booking site’s technology infrastructure.
The deal sees the online accommodation site migrate its web hosting arrangements from a colocation solution with ATOS in favour of a bespoke-built, cloud-based solution, developed in partnership with UKFast.
The recently launched cloud solution now regularly processes 6.4 million events an hour. Laterooms.com currently serves 100 million page requests a month.
Head of IO at LateRooms.com, Stuart Taylor, said: “The new platform gives us improved stability, higher availability and the ability to scale up while remaining cost effective. In short we can do a lot more, with less.
“Throughout the migration process there have been learnings on both sides. UKFast has been thoughtful and responsive to the challenges we faced during a migration that was constrained within tight timescales. Together we have created an amazing platform that is a true business enabler.
“UKFast demonstrated a drive and commitment that is familiar to us in our own internal culture. That coupled with a passion for technology and a solid technical solution gave us the confidence that UKFast would become a partner and not just a supplier.”
A four month migration process saw project teams from both sides working to move LateRooms.com across to their new solution with zero downtime.
UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones said: “LateRooms.com is a brilliant online brand that we're incredibly proud to host. We won the deal up against some very good rivals but they chose us for a number of reasons.
“Growing a business is about the challenges you can overcome and the kind of partnerships you build along the way. They trust our brand and they know we care 100% about every element of the service and the experience we give them.
“They could have used a public cloud provider to deliver their whole solution, but recognised it would be harder to keep control of costs as they scaled up, and they wouldn’t receive the same level of support.”
“They are particularly happy with our approach to collaborative working. For example, we offered our developers to solve a few issues they were experiencing. It is clearly a breath of fresh air for them and it built up a trust immediately.”
The new cloud infrastructure includes an overhaul of LateRooms.com’s dev environment, with custom-built APIs and the ability to spin up new VMs at the click of a button. The solution delivers an extremely flexible and easy-to-use system, responding to the booking site’s need for continuous development and ongoing deployment and integration of new features.
