A high uptime, a good price and ample opportunities for expansion – these were the requirements for the new hosting provider of Relatieplanet (www.relatieplanet.nl). As a result, the biggest dating site in the Netherlands and Belgium opted for LeaseWeb. ‘We can’t afford to be offline.’

The organization
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. Relatieplanet allows visitors to post photos with their personal information, but the site is also a community in which people can respond to each other via, among other things, a chat room, telephone, or video chat with webcam. Relatieplanet is part of the Telegraaf Media Group.

Being offline costs money
‘With over 2.3 million paying members, you can imagine we have a lot to lose if our website is offline for any amount of time,’ says Marnix Wellinghoff, Relatieplanet’s Technical Manager. ‘It happened with our previous provider: we were offline for half a day. If you have customers with a monthly subscription, you really cannot afford to deny them access to the website for half a day. At the time, we were forced to extend all subscriptions by a day. Downtime costs us money – and our reputation if it happens too often. So it is vital for Relatieplanet that the underlying hosting infrastructure is guaranteed.’

Advantages of LeaseWeb hosting
Relatieplanet was unable to expand further in its previous hosting provider’s data centre. ‘That meant that we had to relocate anyway,’ says Wellinghoff. ‘It was a big project to begin with. For that reason, we decided to review our situation and determine whether we were still working with the right hosting provider. We already have positive experience with LeaseWeb for our other company 123Video, hence the switch to LeaseWeb.’

‘LeaseWeb offers huge expansion options,’ explains Wellinghoff. ‘They have a lot of data centre space and a highly scaleable internet infrastructure. Another big advantage is that their personnel is based in the same building as the data centre, which is extremely important for the services provided. If something should go wrong, their employees 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 also stocks a lot of Dell equipment.’

Excellent price for hosting
‘LeaseWeb was also more attractive than other market parties in terms of pricing,’ adds Wellinghoff. ‘The bandwidth rates they offer are much lower than elsewhere, probably due to their high-volume sourcing. Our web architecture at LeaseWeb has built-in redundancy – with routers, firewalls and load balancers – at a price that other hosting providers charge for architecture without built-in redundancy.’

Cisco firewalls, routers and load balancer
The dating site’s dedicated hosting solution consists of a more or less standard web architecture that was designed by Relatieplanet itself. Web servers, application servers (databases, chat server, SMS server) and mail servers are installed behind a number of firewalls. They also have Cisco firewalls and routers, as well as a Cisco load balancer that ensures that the internet traffic is distributed optimally and the site delivers high performance.

Relatieplanet works with privacy-sensitive information, including customer bank details. As a result, the website is subject to heavy security measures. The site itself uses SSl certificates, but the firewalls are also configured fairly strictly to protect the data on the servers within the hosting environment. Moreover, data are encrypted via a Cisco VPN server that Relatieplanet leases from LeaseWeb.

Windows knowledge LeaseWeb
Relatieplanet’s own organization is very knowledgeable about Microsoft. ‘But it takes a lot of network knowledge to set up and manage equipment like firewalls, routers, load balancers and VPNs,’ says Wellinghoff. ‘LeaseWeb is much better at that than we are. They have employees who have the highest level Cisco and Microsoft certification. They also know a lot about Windows, which is a practical knowledge backup for us.’

Data center EvoSwitch
LeaseWeb has housed the hosting solution for 123Video in its climate-neutral data center EvoSwitch (www.evoswitch.com). Wellinghoff: ‘I was really impressed with that. The data centers I have been to so far are all small, cramped spaces that you want to escape from as soon as possible. EvoSwitch is a lot more spacious inside. It is also good that it is a green data center.'

• Dedicated hosting
• High uptime guarantee
• Ample expansion options
• Engineers for knowledge backup
• Adequate hardware stock

A dedicated hosting solution designed by Relatieplanet itself, with web servers, application servers (databases, chat server, SMS server) and mail servers installed behind a number of firewalls.

LeaseWeb has provided Cisco firewalls and routers, as well as a Cisco load balancer that distributes traffic to ensure the best possible performance of the site. The site has strong security with SSl certificates, strictly configured firewalls, and encryption via a VPN server leased from LeaseWeb.