“Web hosting with high uptime is important for our website”
Relatieplanet (www.relatieplanet.nl), the biggest dating site in the Netherlands and Belgium with over 2.3 million members, has placed its hosting environment with international business web hosting service provider Leaseweb (www.leaseweb.com). Relatieplanet opts for Leaseweb because uptime is vital for the site.
Web hosting provider uptime
“It is important to Relatieplanet that the uptime of our hosting provider is extremely high,” says Marnix Wellinghoff, Technical Manager at Relatieplanet.nl. “Relatieplanet is a paid service, with people buying a one-month subscription, for instance. So you really can’t afford to be offline for a day or even half a day. In the past, we have been down for half a day with another hosting party and were forced to extend all subscriptions by a day. This costs us money” especially with our huge subscriber base, but it also costs you your reputation if it happens too often. So it is very important for us that the underlying internet infrastructure is guaranteed.”
Dedicated hosting: Leaseweb
Relatieplanet’s founders sold a share of the site to the Telegraaf Media Group in 2006. As per 1 January of this year, the site is wholly owned by the group, although the founders are still running the site. Apart from that, Relatieplanet’s founders now also run a Dutch version of YouTube under the name 123Video. “123Video’s experience with Leaseweb is extremely good – they have a high uptime. And Relatieplanet could not expand any further in the data centre of the previous hosting provider. So we had to relocate anyway. Because this was already a big project, we decided to reconsider whether Relatieplanet still had the right hosting provider.”
Leaseweb offers a better price
Leaseweb offers ample options for expansion. “The possibilities are huge,” says Wellinghoff. “They have a lot of data centre space and a highly scaleable internet infrastructure. “Another major advantage is that Leaseweb’s personnel is based in the same building as the EvoSwitch data centre (www.evoswitch.com), which is extremely important for the delivered services. If something should go wrong, they will be at the data centre to solve things much more quickly than if they had to drive for 30 minutes to get there. Leaseweb is also much more attractive than other market parties in terms of pricing. Our hosting environment at Leaseweb has built-in redundancy with routers, firewalls and load balancers at a price that other hosting providers charge for an architecture without built-in redundancy.”
Dedicated server with support
Relatieplanet’s hosting environment consists of several servers, including Dell web and application servers and EMC storage servers. Windows is the operating system of choice. The routers, firewalls, switches and load balancers are from Cisco, and a leased VPN (Virtual Private Network) server from Leaseweb ensures that the site’s data are encrypted before transmission in the Relatieplanet environment. Relatieplanet itself handles the remote software management for the hosting environment, with certified Leaseweb people for knowledge backup and hardware management. ‘For instance, I want to leverage Leaseweb’s knowledge of Microsoft Windows. It is also advantageous for us that they can install and repair equipment and have ample Dell stock.’
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About Relatieplanet.nl
Relatieplanet (www.relatieplanet.nl) is the biggest and busiest dating site in the Netherlands and Belgium. Since it was established in 2002, the site has registered over 2.3 million serious singles who are looking for a relationship, friendship or date. Some 1200 new members register every day. The site offers visitors several contact options. Subscribers can post photos with their personal information, but it is more than that. It is a community in which people can respond to each other via, among other things, a chat room, telephone, or video chat with webcam. Relatieplanet.nl was recently acquired by the Telegraaf Media Group.