In this blog series, we explore five common server infrastructure symptoms that affect organisations throughout the world every day.
We follow the stories of fictitious companies – all dealing with real-life challenges – and examine the consequences of their decision making.
Servers.com customers come to us in similar situations all the time, and you can read their stories too, as we feature case studies from recent projects where we’ve been able to help.
Do these symptoms sound familiar? If you are facing similar challenges, you can speak to our team at any time.
Despite being competitors operating out of the same office building, fintech firms, HookPay and QuickZapp, enjoyed a friendly relationship and had experienced comparable growth journeys.
Initially starting out with on-premise servers, HookPay decided to switch its infrastructure to a major hyperscale provider when it became apparent its existing set-up was struggling to cope with a growing number of tasks.
Experiencing similar problems, QuickZapp took action too but decided instead to co-locate its servers with a small data centre that promised outstanding customer service.
Both businesses were convinced the other was wrong.
HookPay was adamant that it had made the right decision by moving its infrastructure to an established enterprise brand that offered near limitless scalability.
QuickZapp felt HookPay wasn’t big enough for the hyperscale provider to care, should they run into problems. Conversely, the staff at QuickZapp’s colocation data centre were always on hand to solve any server problem, even if the facility itself was a little ‘antiquated’.
HookPay found that whenever the business needed to make a change to its infrastructure, they were confronted with complex buying options and little or no support from the provider in identifying the best options. Consequently, they were forced to follow online guides and piece together an architecture they hoped would work.
Meanwhile, QuickZapp found that its infrastructure would become randomly unavailable. The phone would always be answered when someone called with a problem – and they would receive lots of warmly worded assurances – but the issues kept happening.
Although their issues were becoming more common, both companies became used to their respective problems – until each achieved an innovation breakthrough.
HookPay developed functionality on its app that would automatically switch funds from one account to another before an overdraft limit was exceeded.
In a different part of the building, QuickZapp had made it possible for its users to transfer spare funds into a pension fund at the click of a button. These two new functionalities were wildly popular and both apps shot to the top of the most-downloaded chart.
With access to massive scalability, HookPay confidently put a request into its hyperscaler via the customer portal for extra servers. Though the servers were provisioned quickly, errors surfaced and began to interfere with the way users could access and navigate their way through the app.
Knowing they’d get through to their provider straight away, QuickZapp rang its colocation data centre to inform their account manager they were sending more servers over, and that these needed to be online as soon as possible. However, due to shipping times, coupled with the time to rack and cable the servers, this would take a few weeks to complete.
In the ensuing weeks, and with both server infrastructures unable to support optimal performance, both apps ceased to function. Worse still, a rival fintech company, CleverPenny, added both HookPay’s and QuickZapp’s functionality into its own app.
Supported by a provider that offered a cutting edge architecture and meticulous server maintenance but with the scale to provide exceptional customer service, CleverPenny’s startling growth was easily accommodated.
As for HookPay and QuickZapp? Well, they still operate from the same office block but both moved their servers to a new provider – the same one as CleverPenny.
Both are waiting for their next innovation breakthrough.
A multi-cloud PaaS provider looking for a stable bare metal server infrastructure in Europe.
Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud Platform-as-a-Service that helps customers to focus on their business growth instead of spending precious resources on IT infrastructure configuration and management.
The company was looking for stable bare metal infrastructure in Europe to install its platform for a key customer with a specific requirement – for 5 servers to be stored in a single rack, so a cloud Storage cluster could be built.
Click here to find out how Servers.com provided Jelastic with a 5-server rack that allowed the build of their cloud Storage cluster – with zero attention-seeking.
