How Forest Holidays migrated its hosted website to a managed service

Forest Holidays has migrated its website from Rackspace to a fully managed hosted service from Node4 to ramp up performance.

The company, which offers woodland holidays across multiple UK locations, relies extensively on its website to provide customers the information they need to choose and book a holiday. However, as the business grew, Forest Holidays found it was facing problems with the site and the back-end SQL Server database.

The company found its previous Rackspace service for small businesses was becoming too restrictive. The web servers were hosted throughRackspace’s small business package, with Rackspace-supplied standard servers. As the company began growing rapidly, it found the small business package did not have the redundancy or the service levels it required.

According toNick Danson, head of digital and IT at Forest Holidays, moving up to the next level of performance and reliability Rackspace’s enterprise level was a much larger step up than the company actually needed. Instead, the company decided to take a different approach and switched over to a Node4 managed service.

Danson joined the company in 2016, a few months after Forest Holidays took the decision to migrate its website onto Node4 .

Describing the reasons for the migration, Danson says:“We didn’t have our own kit to Rackspace, it was on a hosted server. Node4 suggested a hosted rack, with our kit, offering us the flexibility to grow.

“Since the company was growing rapidly, the predictable costs of owning the hardware was more appealing compared to a usage-based price, where the company’s web server costs are more directly related to the volume of customers visiting the site. A completely self-contained setup seemed easier and more flexible,” he adds.

Forest Holidays chose a Cisco UCS chassis installed at Node4’s Northampton datacentre to run its website. The UCS chassis hosts a VMware vSphere cluster to run Microsoft SQL Server, the website running in its domain, and NetScaler virtualised load balancers.

Node4 was able to deliver robust support, flexibility, scalability and significant return on investment (ROI) to Forest Holidays, as well as the ability to provide more products and services whenever it was needed, according to Danson.

“The managed service provided by Node 4 covers every part of the IT for the website. We can put in a request to have anything changed such as firewall or adding more memory to SQL Server. If we have issues with SQL Server, Node4 can have a response in a few minutes. A service request will take a couple of hours,” he says.

Node4 has been running Forest Holidays’ website for almost two years. Discussing how the site coped with the August 2018 bank holiday weekend, Danson says the website was able to support the level of interest the company received during the peak holiday season.

“The business has 10 sites and 560 cabins. August 20 was our best weekend, and we ran 100% occupancy across all sites,” he adds.

Now that the website is hosted at Node4, Danson says he is confident the website and equipment can scale as the business grows, adding that he will be looking at moving other applications to Node 4 in the future.

“We have typical IT comms at our HQ, so we are looking at whether to move some of that to Node4 to remove as much IT equipment as possible from the head office,” says Danson.

Read more about datacentre migration The team behind ScottishPower’s recent two-year push to downsize and migrate its primary datacentre describe the project’s challenges and successes. Drew Nielsen, chief trust officer at cloud-based backup provider Druva, shares a scary and hairy tale about how shortfalls in any company’s upkeep and maintenance schedule can result in some nasty surprises when datacentre migration time arrives.