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Case Studies > New Zealand VPS provider RimuHosting keeps thousands of servers humming with New Relic

New Zealand VPS provider RimuHosting keeps thousands of servers humming with New Relic

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

The Challenge

RimuHosting, a New Zealand-based hosting provider, was experiencing performance degradation and unexplained issues that they needed to diagnose. The company's open, non-hierarchical culture meant that everyone was encouraged to handle any issue and go the extra mile for a customer. However, the tools they were using to track down bugs and errors were proving to be slow and painful. They were also finding that the ongoing performance monitoring was becoming a more substantial task. As a hosting provider, it was critical that their webserver was up and running 24/7 as it contained the control panel for both the host servers and the virtual servers (VPS) running on them.

About The Customer

RimuHosting is a New Zealand-based hosting provider founded by Peter Bryant in 2003. The company was one of the early Linux Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting companies and also one of the first to offer Zen-based VPS hosting. RimuHosting's goals are simple: Offer a flexible, reliable hosting service and make customers deliriously happy with the support they receive. With a mantra of 'Support worth raving about,' every employee is encouraged to go above and beyond to delight their customers with the company’s hosting services. The company has no sales, marketing, or even support teams. Everyone does everything. The company sponsors a variety of conferences and beyond that, growth has come organically from word of mouth and referrals. Today RimuHosting runs thousands of servers for thousands of customers.

The Solution

RimuHosting turned to New Relic, a performance monitoring and management solution. New Relic was fast and easy to install and get running. Developers had to do their own installs and the team was so impressed that they started using it on everything. They usually turn to New Relic as the first step when diagnosing unexpected slowdowns. It saves them a lot of time, and their customers a lot of money. Their customers, who run the gamut from small home users to large well-known sites, use it too. They use it to debug their applications and to deliver the performance they need. When there’s an issue, they are immediately able to identify what it is, its source and how to go about fixing it.

Operational Impact

RimuHosting spends a lot less time on code and a lot more time on their websites and with their customers.
Customers require less support overall.
Once New Relic is installed and the customer is comfortable with it, RimuHosting almost never hears from them.

Quantitative Benefit

One of RimuHosting’s customers was able to get over 100 websites on about 1GB of RAM by better managing and re-distributing how things were done, even with traffic spikes and peak traffic loads. Anyone else would have been using 4GB of RAM for that number of websites.
Another customer uses less overall resources because New Relic has helped him to optimize their code.