Customer Success Story
Newfold Digital International unifies its technology stack with Virtuozzo Hybrid Server
Global web-presence giant chooses Virtuozzo to simplify operations and ensure continuing service excellence for more than 550,000 customers.
Gavin Gibson
Digital International
Newfold Digital International provides a comprehensive range of web-presence solutions, including web and Wordpress hosting, email hosting, server hosting, domain name registration, online marketing tools and related web technologies, in global markets including the Asia Pacific region and the United Kingdom.
Through its primary go to market brands, Bluehost, Crazy Domains and Vodien, the company’s intuitive online solutions empower over 550,000 small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses to establish, maintain, and market their web presence.
The challenge
Newfold Digital International was seeking a unified technology infrastructure and architecture that satisfied both external and internal requirements – a technology stack that provided their clients with complete scalability and reliability, while providing their operations team with an easy-to-maintain, technology stack that would provide both horizontal and vertical scalability to grow and evolve as customer requirements change.
The web-presence provider was previously using a combination of systems – an open-source server solution and various proprietary virtualization and storage solutions – that were built and inherited over the years. This disparate approach did not address the desired performance and management requirements. For example, the dissimilar technologies and vendors added considerable work hours and unnecessarily complicated the management of:
Furthermore, Newfold Digital International was on a major acquisition burst, with 13 different companies acquired over the past several years. All those disparate systems needed to be integrated into the existing IT software and hardware infrastructure and platforms, a daunting challenge that added to the already immense complexity.
Integrating those acquisitions compelled the organization to not only strengthen alignment across the business but to ensure that the technology stack would be flexible enough to serve both their and their clients’ growth requirements long-term.
Solution requirements
When choosing a unified solution, the Newfold Digital International team brainstormed every possible use case, based on internal stakeholders and customer-facing requirements. The goal was to determine a singular approach that would serve the needs of two distinct groups.
Despite Newfold Digital International possessing proprietary virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies, it did not make commercial sense to continue using their system as it would have significantly reduced profit margins on commoditized products and services.
Only Virtuozzo presented the capabilities to fulfill Newfold Digital International’s immediate needs, with technologies that continuously evolve and are versatile enough to meet future requirements. Virtuozzo’s years of proven industry experience, also further gave the web-presence provider peace of mind. In addition, the way the Virtuozzo infrastructure was designed would enable Newfold Digital International to offer non-commoditized services while minimizing operating costs.
“Virtuozzo presented a variety of feasible options to choose from,” said Gavin Gibson, President, Newfold Digital International. “That allowed us to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, letting us evaluate all aspects of their technology with the other market options to come to a practical decision.”
Virtuozzo Hybrid Server
Virtuozzo Hybrid Server creates a single technology stack for Newfold Digital International, eliminating the maintenance challenges of its current environment, making it easier to integrate later acquisitions, and serving the growth potential of both Newfold Digital International and its customers.
Virtuozzo Hybrid Server delivers containers, a hypervisor based on optimized KVM, and software-defined storage. It also provides comprehensive encryption, native Docker support, backups, high availability, ReadyKernel, advanced memory management, and live migration – all in a single package.
Having all the virtualization technology in one solution supports multiple scenarios and eliminates vendor lock-in, allowing complete freedom of workload operations to achieve the greatest performance and density within any cloud or data center environment. The solution enables legacy workload, bare-metal performance, secure isolation and encryption, and portability typically only seen with app containers. Live migration and high availability and mutability between containers and VMs are built-in.
One tech stack everywhere
Virtuozzo’s comprehensive software solution allows Newfold Digital International to use the same tech stack across every datacenter location. It delivers both horizontal and vertical scalability and availability, making it easier to handle growing internal use cases and customer-facing requirements as well as integrate acquisitions for the short- and long-term. Technical integration via APIs is also critical, as Newfold Digital International will be building and adding custom components to the software.
Furthermore, having everything under a single umbrella means that only one team is needed to manage global technology operations, regardless of whether it is customer-facing or internal… in Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Kiev , or the Philippines. This allows the Newfold Digital International teams, who were spending all their time managing disparate systems, to use their “brain power” for work that will advance the organization as a whole and deliver greater capabilities and features for their customers.
The experience
Beyond the superiority of Virtuozzo Hybrid Server on a technology level, Virtuozzo’s client service team made the entire process easy for Newfold Digital International.
“The passion of the Virtuozzo team to ensure their technology meets our every requirement makes it a pleasure to work with them,” said Maxym Labunskyi, Newfold Digital International’s Systems Administration Manager. “Any time an issue occurs, they are at the ready.”
“The Virtuozzo team has always been very easy to work with,” added Gavin. “That, combined with their high level of technical expertise and superior product line, made partnering with them an obvious choice.”
“While the implementation process is still ongoing, we are already seeing improvements. We believe our customers are satisfied with the service and support that we were able to build for them, as well as improvements that they received upon moving to brand new hardware and systems. It is worth noting specifically that there were no outages on our first new Virtuozzo cluster for 8 months of it in production, therefore causing no negative impact on customers.”
The future
Newfold Digital International continues to migrate disparate systems into Virtuozzo Hybrid Server. The project so far has been successful. As each “old” system shuts down, the challenges of disparate maintenance, security, multi-faceted automation, disaster recovery, failover, and backup are minimized and will eventually be eliminated.
The Virtuozzo team is working closely with the Newfold Digital International technical teams to customize their technology to meet their specific requirements.
A single, united system will make it much easier for Newfold’s support team to handle over 550,000 customers. With a touch of a button, they’ll be able to directly address their customers’ issues without having to determine which system the issue is occurring on.
