case study
Miss Group standardizes on Virtuozzo
for mass-market hosting, reduces costs 25-40%
and accelerates growth for local hosting champions
Miss Group is a fast-growing and customer-friendly digital solutions provider with an extensive presence in Europe and a growing presence in the Americas. Miss Group has more than 30 cloud and hosting brands serving SME and enterprise customers across the world.
Miss Group was founded in 2014 and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. The company serves more than 700,000 customers today, and is growing organically as well as through an active acquisition strategy: Miss Group is currently acquiring and integrating multiple hosting brands per year.
Unlike some large hosting businesses, however, Miss Group’s strategy is to keep the brand and unique service proposition of the companies it acquires. Miss Group CTO, Petter Lund, explains:
“Our M&A approach is to look for local champions within a region. When we bring those companies into Miss Group our aim is to maintain their local identity, to keep the things that led customers to choose those brands in the first place,” he says.
The hosting consolidation challenge
This strategy has underpinned Miss Group’s success, but with so many brands joining the company Miss Group reached an infrastructure inflection point. Across the group there were brands using Proxmox, OpenStack, OpenVZ, VMware, OnApp and Virtuozzo. In the interests of efficiency, the team embarked on a new standardization strategy.
“We wanted to become smarter at the hardware layer, the virtualization layer, even the system or platform layer,” Petter says. “For our mass-market hosting brands, we chose to standardize on Virtuozzo. This allows us to optimize resource usage, get economies of scale, reduce hardware and operational costs and grow our local brands more quickly.”
Miss Group is now migrating its mass-market hosting brands to Virtuozzo Hybrid Server, Virtuozzo’s highly tuned hosting platform. It’s a bare-metal virtualization solution that includes system container virtualization, KVM-based virtual machines, software-defined storage and easy-to-use control panels for hosting providers and their customers.
Petter Lund
Miss Group CTO
Standardizing on Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo Hybrid Server’s ultra-efficient storage and memory management enables Miss Group providers to increase density (customers per server) by 25-40%, which translates to a 25-40% reduction in total cost of ownership in terms of server hardware, power, cooling and other operational costs.
“We analyzed the platforms in use across our business, and looked at other options on the market. Virtuozzo’s product and commercial approach suited us best for mass hosting, which is where we provide domain services, shared hosting services and VPS services,” Petter explains.
“Virtuozzo gives us a super-efficient container platform, the scalability and performance we want, and the efficiency of the platform makes a big difference in total cost of ownership. And, we can rely on Virtuozzo to do continuous development: we don’t have to focus on that, which reduces cost of ownership even further.”
Partnership for an efficient future
Miss Group’s hosting consolidation program began with two brands that had already reached their hardware refresh point. As new brands join the group, and existing brands reach their hardware refresh, all mass-market hosting services will eventually be migrated to Virtuozzo Hybrid Server.
According to Petter, working with Virtuozzo is a great relationship, and the teams have worked closely together on architectural, design and commercial decisions throughout the project.
“Our technical teams find the Virtuozzo platform easy to work with, too,” he says. “I believe this partnership approach is very important. It’s important for our hosting brands to have that personal relationship with customers, and just as important for us to have close relationships with our partners.”
Virtuozzo is now one of three strategic partners that Miss Group is standardizing on for the future growth of its business, and each of the Miss Group hosting champion brands. Virtuozzo is the standard for mass market hosting; Fujitsu is the standard partner for infrastructure; and for enterprise IaaS services, Miss Group will continue to use VMware.
“For customers who need a one-stop shop for their digital presence, on the web, Miss Group can take you throughout the entire journey and cover more or less all of your needs – and Virtuozzo will be powering a lot of that,” Petter concludes.
For more information, check out Miss Group and how to get started with Virtuozzo Hybrid Server.
