notonthehighstreet.com Selects Rackspace® Hosting to Help Support its Growth

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the service leader in cloud computing, today announced that it is now hosting the IT business backbone of ground-breaking online retailer, notonthehighstreet.com – an online marketplace that offers curated collections of unique products and gifts. With over 3,000 small business partners, this home-grown UK tech success story company recently secured £10 million in funding.

The single server originally used to host notonthehighstreet.com was quickly augmented through Rackspace services by the addition of a separate database server. The company then subsequently migrated rapidly to a high-availability solution with fully redundant network devices, SAN storage and clustered application and file servers – all supported by The Fanatical Support Promise^® and managed 24/7/365 by the Rackspace Intensive^® Team.

Gregory Becker, Senior Technical Manager at notonthehighstreet.com, said, “The Fanatical Support we receive is amazing. Rackspace never give up and if you have a problem at any time of the day or night you get to speak with a systems engineer. You don’t have to go through multiple layers of support. Once you’ve received Fanatical Support there really is no comparison,” added Becker.

Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director International at Rackspace, said, “notonthehighstreet.com has significantly grown year-on-year since its launch in 2006 and has achieved great success with its retail innovation. With thousands of interesting and original products, frequent offers and special promotions running online mean that the company needs a trusted provider to help keep its website up and running. It is encouraging to see progressive e-retailers in the UK like notonthehighstreet.com taking positive steps to support their future growth using cloud-based services in this way.”

Notonthehighstreet.com is now considering a hybrid cloud model as it continues to grow and to help ensure it is using technology to stay responsive and competitive. This hybrid model will see the retailer’s existing systems, with all their resilience and security features, bolstered by the ability to expand availability and bandwidth instantly to respond to spikes in site traffic.

Gregory Becker, Senior Technical Manager at notonthehighstreet.com, concluded: “We are always looking at ways to improve the customer experience, which is why we are now exploring the possibilities of implementing a hybrid cloud hosting solution where managed servers and managed cloud can be combined to offer immense flexibility and instant expandability. This option provides us with the high security and guaranteed performance of managed servers. The Rackspace team is already working on the optimum hybrid hosting solution to match our next phase of growth.”

Notonthehighstreet.com, the multi award-winning online marketplace, is one of the most high profile e-commerce businesses in the UK and has experienced explosive growth since the company was founded in 2006 by Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish. Notonthehighstreet.com brings together over 3,000 independent small UK businesses that combined sell over 50,000 products through a single checkout. Each small business has been carefully chosen by notonthehighstreet.com for its innovative, well-made products to inspire shoppers looking for style, originality and quality. Now over 40 small businesses apply each day to become part of notonthehighstreet.com.

The notonthehighstreet.com - Rackspace case study can be found at: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/case-studies/28_Not_On_The_Highstreet.pdf