Hostway Case Study

Hostway is a provider of flexible, dedicated hosting and managed services. In 1989 the company launched its first datacenter in Chicago. Hostway now has operations in 11 countries, specializing in customized solutions for clients in a range of industries.

The requirements

Rapidly growing an international business while maintaining a strong corporate identity is a significant challenge. That’s why in the third quarter of 2010, Hostway made the decision to align all its international businesses so they offered the same products and services.

“Our business took a new direction and the company wanted to offer the same products globally, but that wasn’t something we could deliver in the Netherlands without enormous investment,” explains Martin Wielomski, technical director of Hostway Netherlands. “Fortunately we discovered EvoSwitch. They had a datacenter in the right location that offered the security, reliability and flexibility we needed.”

The solution

During 2010, Hostway looked at several potential datacenters in the Netherlands. EvoSwitch impressed because it was the only supplier that offered a UAE3410 (previously SAS70) certification, which indicates a very high level of information security – and is critical for Hostway in attracting customers from the financial services sector.

EvoSwitch also offered a variety of power supply options, which could support clients with very high power needs. “It’s something not every supplier could offer,” says Wielomski. In addition, the environmental credentials of EvoSwitch were very attractive to Hostway, along with the datacenter’s carbon-neutral status and green energy-efficient design features. “As a global company it’s important to us to be able to tell customers we aren’t impacting negatively on the environment,” Wielomski says. “It’s an important market differentiator.”

The EvoSwitch next generation datacenter in Amsterdam is located conveniently close to Hostway’s European offices, and crucially offers a connection to the Amsterdam Exchange. This means that Hostway can offer better traffic management and throughput to its customers, explains Wielomski. Another important factor in Hostway’s decision to work with EvoSwitch is the company’s carrier neutral service. EvoSwitch was the only supplier to offer a price-competitive service that combined good redundancy with the flexibility that the company requires. This means that Hostway is able to support customers no matter what carrier they choose, and can also adapt services to meet customers’ priorities and budgets. “Someone may specify a carrier, but other times we might be able to offer a cheaper service using a different carrier,” explains Wielomski. “It means we can be completely flexible and respond to customers’ needs.”

Partnering with EvoSwitch also means that Hostway can easily customize a service for each customer, from placing the customers’ own racks in the datacenter to guaranteeing a specific carrier or geographic location for customer data.

Since offering services through the EvoSwitch datacenter in the Netherlands, Hostway has been able to secure new customers with products bound to the geographical region it previously could not have offered locally. "We have been able to approach customers we work with outside the Netherlands and say, hey, now we can offer those same services in the Netherlands, or we can offer twin datacenter solutions with global redundancy,” explains Wielomski. Six months into the new agreement, Wielomski has been impressed with how easy EvoSwitch has been to work with, and how quickly questions have been resolved by the EvoSwitch team.

Most importantly, EvoSwitch is helping to drive Hostway's local business in the Netherlands and supports Hostway's redundancy across Europe. “We used to be approached by customers who wanted to be in the Netherlands, and we couldn’t really offer them our full portfolio of services. Now that we have access to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, we can offer a point of presence near a major hub, and we have a full product portfolio. That is extremely important and helps us attract a lot more international business.”