The Distance - UK

www.thedistance.co.uk Download as a .pdf

Summary

UK creative and digital agency The Distance believes in just that – going the distance for its clients. Be it developing innovative new mobile applications for its customers, or designing and hosting ecommerce sites, The Distance is in it for the long haul, helping its clients not only create an online presence capable of meeting today’s demand, but also ensuring they can cope with whatever tomorrow throws at them.

For The Distance’s many retail customers, having a website that turns visitors into buyers is their number one business objective. A crucial element here is ensuring that websites are always available as any delay in a site loading, or being responsive, will equal lost sales and damage credibility. And of course, the stakes become even higher as ecommerce companies continue on their rapid growth trajectories.

To meet the challenge of ensuring that their clients’ ecommerce sites are always available, The Distance has turned to FireHost. Not only do FireHost’s secure cloud hosting services offer managed support, and are backed by one of the industry’s most comprehensive security solutions, the company’s cloud- based model means it can scale in line with the exact requirements of each of The Distance’s customers, whether they’re a start up with just a handful of customers or a web giant experiencing millions of hits.

Challenge

The Distance prides itself on the level of personalized service it offers its clients, many of which are young, rapidly growing ecommerce firms that rightly prefer to focus on their key business operations, rather than be distracted by the design and day-to-day management of their websites.

Making use of the Magento platform, The Distance is able to design and develop ecommerce sites that meet these companies’ exact requirements, maximizing conversion rates and providing comprehensive analytics of how users are referred to – and subsequently use – their sites. The agency is different from others because it invests time in building strategic relationships with its customers, helping them devise web strategies that are flexible enough to stand the test of time.

But while The Distance is focused on helping its clients for the long term, it was struggling to find a hosting provider that shared the same values. As Ryan Atkins, online director and founder at The Distance explains, “most web hosting firms take a very transactional approach to selling their services – you say what you need and they give you a price. There’s often a complete lack of counsel when it comes to improving the speed, availability or security of a site; plus the quality of support varies wildly.”

The tipping point for The Distance came when it was increasingly being asked for enterprise-class hosting services. “Although our ecommerce clients all operate in different sectors, they share one vital characteristic – they are all growing fast so they need more and more guarantees about the availability of their websites. After all, if their sites disappear, so will their customers. We therefore needed a partner that would go the extra mile to ensure that our clients’ sites never go dark, regardless of how many visitors they have, how variable their traffic is or what security threats they are facing,” continues Atkins.

Solution

After careful evaluation of a number of hosting providers, The Distance decided to partner with secure cloud hosting specialist FireHost, which offers 24/7/365 monitoring of all sites in order to prevent security threats and malicious activity. In the event that a Denial of Service (DoS) attack is launched on a website, FireHost can automatically offload traffic to an alternative server, without causing any disruption to service. This level of security means The Distance’s customers are now guaranteed 100 percent uptime, a promise that is backed up with service level agreements. An added benefit is that FireHost’s services are Payment Card Initiative (PCI) compliant, ensuring those firms processing credit card data are also meeting industry regulations.

“For us, choosing the right web host for our customers is all about trust. We have total confidence in FireHost because it goes above and beyond when it comes to securing websites and scaling for uptime,” says Atkins. “We also get a lot of value from FireHost’s real-time security reports. These show us all the attempted hacks targeting our customers, and we also get plenty of great advice about how to improve the performance and availability of our clients’ sites in the long term.”

The Distance is also finding FireHost’s cloud-based model ideally suited to the ever-changing needs of its various customers. As Atkins explains, “we’re lucky to have a number of high growth customers, but it’s vital to these firms that they can cope as more and more customers visit their sites. FireHost’s cloud model means it can track these requirements, adding more server capacity as and when it’s needed. With FireHost, a million hits a day – or even an hour – is no sweat.”

FireHost is also offering a very practical solution to the peaks and troughs in demand experienced by many ecommerce firms. “Seasonal variations in trading mean that some customers often need to scale up or down their operations for short bursts of time. With FireHost this is absolutely no problem, changes are instantaneous, with no lengthy waits,” continues Atkins. “Just as importantly, FireHost doesn’t tie us into onerous contracts. This lack of bureaucracy makes FireHost easy to do business with and means we don’t have to waste money paying for capacity we don’t need.”

Visit The Distance's secure website:
www.thedistance.co.uk