Since 2006, Alys Griffiths Photography www.alysgriffiths.com has been providing wedding and portrait photography in Stafford. What started out as a solo venture For Alys, soon became a partnership with her husband Andy Straw joining the company, allowing them to share their love of photography in incredible places with amazing people.
As the business has grown they’ve even teamed up with another local photographer to provide photography and fine art training courses under the “Illuminate Training” brand (www.illuminate.training) offering one day, weekend and longer courses for photographers and painters both in the UK and overseas.
Andy Straw of Alys Griffith photography has taken time out to share with us how Fasthosts new Cloud servers added to the success of their business.
What was the main problem or challenge you wanted to address?
“Our previous host was a small business who provided us with a good service, but sadly not a scalable one. One of the problems we encountered with shared hosting was that we couldn’t choose who we were sharing a server with. If another site was compromised, we’d end up with our SEO taking a hit, as our shared IP would end up blacklisted. We now have 5 separate websites for different areas of our business and it was time for us to start looking for faster and more reliable hosting. We use WordPress as a CMS because it doesn’t cost us anything and allows us to spend less time working on our websites and more time behind the camera doing what we love (and paying the bills). We also had some difficulties where we needed to run certain plugins which required PHP features our previous host hadn’t enabled or couldn’t enable for one reason or another.”
How did the Fasthosts Cloud Server help you address this?
“The great thing about our Cloud server is just how scalable it is – a basic server isn’t expensive and it can grow with us – we just log on to our Fasthosts account and add extra processing, memory or storage capacity by dragging sliders around – it’s almost too easy. Since we’re no longer sharing our server with others we no longer run the risk of their sites upsetting our SEO and we have full control over the software versions we’re running.”
What has the main benefit been of using Fasthosts Cloud server been, so far?
“The set up process was incredibly simple – in the course of a 10 minute phone call with an operator, who clearly knew his stuff, we were able to get everything set up and an hour later our server was ready to go. We feel more in control now – we’ve got access to do what we need to do on our server 24-7 without the need to call support. The speed improvement is also noticeable – even on a fairly low spec’d server.”
Like to find out more about Fasthosts Cloud servers?
Fasthosts Cloud Servers, purpose built for the SMB market run on a new and unique infrastructure. Designed by Fasthosts experts, and based on the latest Microsoft and Dell technologies, the team have re-defined and strengthened industry best practice. The performance of the new Cloud Server easily accommodates complex eCommerce databases, custom CRM apps, custom web applications and can even be used as a development staging area or for a reseller with performance sensitive websites. View full details here www.fasthosts.co.uk/cloud-servers
