MEMBERS ONLY SHOPPING IS GOING PLACES
Founded in 2007, SecretSales has grown to become the UK’s leading independent exclusive private shopping club, with over 2 million members signed up to benefit from the discounted designer brand products sold on the website, www.secretsales.com.
SecretSales works with over 650 different designer brands to offer its members exclusive prices on a range of different fashion, accessory, home ware, travel, and other lifestyle products, delivered online through time-limited sales promotions.
The company has recently secured investment of £6.3 million to boost its continued growth and now employs over 50 people from its Notting Hill office in London.
UPGRADING FOR SUCCESS
SecretSales had been working with Sleek for several years when it became apparent that their continued success, ambitious future expansion and growth plans would require additional hosting resource to deal with the growth and resulting increase in visitors to the website.
A project to build a new enterprise Internet Infrastructure platform was agreed, that would deliver the power, performance and scalability that would support the significant growth forecast for the future. This platform would deliver the additional capacity and power they would need to ensure optimum website performance through a period of sustained success and growing visitor numbers.
Customer Quote Sleek continue to play an important supporting role in our on-going growth by providing a stable, flexible and well supported hosting platform for our Internet operations and we’d recommend them to anyone looking for scalable, flexible internet infrastructure solutions. As a fast-growing company, we offer our customers the very highest standards of service and a responsive, consistent web experience is absolutely critical to our online success. Sleek are more than just a supplier, they have become a valued and trusted partner who have proven their commitment to SecretSales through consistent and unwavering service. Nish Kukadia, CEO of SecretSales.com
THE SLEEK DIFFERENCE
Drawing on our teams’ wealth of ecommerce hosting experience, we were able to design a new platform and implementation schedule that would minimise the disruption to the current operation of the SecretSales website and provide the capacity and performance they required for their growth strategy.
THE SOLUTION
The solution we proposed was to include a number of load-balanced, heavy-duty webservers with caching features that are capable of scaling with demand, along with a new performance orientated database cluster to ensure database information is quick and secure. Other services include content servers and administration servers to push content across the webserver estate. When the internet facing portion of the solution was thoroughly tested and performance was optimum, the site was transitioned to the new platform in a staged and carefully planned migration that ensured there was no disruption to service and no outage.
THE EXECUTION
As the site traffic ebbs and flows with each exclusive sale the web heads often bear the brunt of the increasing traffic and these were the main focus in our design considerations.
The flexible and scalable way all our solutions are constructed meant that extending and improving the web facing elements was something that was easily implemented, while also minimising the cost and ensuring SecretSales only had to invest in the development of additional hosting infrastructure that they required.
We implemented a front-end webserver farm with powerful HP Proliant DL380 Server models that can cope with high demand during peak sales. Load-balancing is performed with Brocade ADX Load-balancing switches and the platform is protected by a High-Availability pair of Cisco firewalls that ensure the number of available concurrent connections as well delivering protection and control over the traffic to the internet platform.
This increased power and capacity along with the routing of the web traffic via Sleek Network’s resilient BGP transit network further added to the robust nature of the new solution, ensuring that the growth of SecretSales would be supported by a hosting platform designed specifically to keep pace with and accommodate their continued success.
Ryan McCarry, Managing Director of Sleek said:
We are delighted to support and continue to be part of the success of SecretSales, which is currently in a very exciting period in its’ online growth and development.
Supporting successful Ecommerce businesses has always been an integral part of Sleeks outlook and remit. We feel very privileged to work with companies like SecretSales and we place a lot of emphasis on ensuring we have the skills, knowledge and technology to provide them with the robust and scalable platforms they need to succeed.
