Rochen® Ltd.

Rochen® Ltd. provides shared web hosting, virtualization, and complex server solutions for over 6,000 customers in 60+ countries. Based in the United Kingdom, the company serves a diverse clientele, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. Rochen focuses on reliable service and high-performance delivery of client web sites, with support for dynamic applications such as WordPress®, Drupal®, and Joomla®.

"Our customers—especially our larger enterprise customers—depend on us for high availability and continuous uptime of their web sites and virtualized data," explains Chris Adams, founder and CEO of Rochen. "Our success is due to our focus on customer support, and our investment in the best possible infrastructure."

Selecting a U.S. Data Center

Rochen maintains data center locations in Dallas, Texas and London, England, giving customers the choice of hosting their web sites and data on a U.S. or U.K. server. In selecting a U.S. data center, Rochen chose Colo4's Dallas data center based on their power redundancy, premium network architecture, and 24/7 on-site support.

Adams looked at several large U.S. data centers and consulted with numerous providers before choosing Colo4's Dallas facility. In addition to its infrastructure and support services, Adams chose the Dallas facility based on its central location away from the coasts. The city is out of hurricane pathways, but is also a hub for connectivity.

Enabling Growth

"The numbers speak for themselves," says Adams. "Rochen started with one cabinet at Colo4, and we are now up to 11. The overall combination of performance, high availability and capacity along with the redundancy of the architecture is very important to us. Colo4 has been a great partner in helping us grow."

Rochen is preparing to launch a cloud-computing platform. To support this initiative, the company is taking advantage of the fully-redundant and higher voltage 208V A/B 2N power configuration in Colo4's data center. The dual circuit power supply ensures continuous availability for client applications and data on Rochen’s cloud, while providing premium operating conditions for Rochen’s servers.

"A cloud environment needs to be self-healing and fully redundant," Adams explains, “Many hosting providers who offer cloud services often overlook the underlying infrastructure redundancy like power."

"The fact that Colo4 offers various power configurations has been helpful to us," Adams adds. "Our current 208 volt power supplies at 30 amps enable us to deploy at a much higher density. We can put more servers in a single cabinet while maintaining full redundancy."

In terms of connectivity, Rochen employs redundant fiber handoffs from Colo4's premium network architecture. In the event of a router failure, the network's Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) will automatically switch Rochen's connectivity over to a secondary fiber route, ensuring continuity of Rochen's hosting and virtualization services.

Relying on Remote Hands

Beyond connectivity, power and redundancy, Adams believes that quality of support sets Colo4 apart from other data center providers.

"Early on in our business, we made a critical decision that Rochen begin managing its own infrastructure instead of simply renting servers," says Adams. "With Managed Remote Hands, Colo4 is able to provide us with a level of support that larger data center companies aren't capable of giving to their clients."

"We don’t have staff in Dallas, so we had to make sure our data center would have a reliable staff. We do our own remote monitoring, but if we need something physical like a network cable replaced or a hard disk swapped, we need to know that our data center's staff can take care of our maintenance requests quickly and without hassle. You’d be amazed how many data center providers can’t get these things done in a timely and professional manner."

Adams makes the trip to Dallas to inspect his servers two or three times a year, but says that Colo4’s Remote Hands support makes it easy for Rochen to pick up the phone and call in a maintenance request.

Colo4's 24/7 on-site data center staff enables Rochen to schedule maintenance windows for its customers during off-peak hours, to ensure minimal disruption of its web hosting services. Also, Adams appreciates the cost effectiveness of Colo4’s Remote Hands service, which is billed in 15 minute increments—not the one-hour minimum required by many data center providers.

"The Colo4 on-site staff has been great to work with," says Adams. "We would never consider going to a larger provider because we couldn’t get the responsive and professional support that Colo4's personnel provide for us. We’re committed to providing our customers with extremely high quality service and Colo4 is a vital part of delivering on that promise."