PhotoBox.com prepares for seasonal peak demands

PhotoBox Group, a leading European personalised printing company, has selected Interoute’s global networked cloud infrastructure platform Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC), to ensure customers have a fast seamless ordering experience across Europe, during seasonal traffic peaks on its e-retail consumer websites.

The Group, made of several brands including PhotoBox, Moonpig and Sticky9, has more than eight million active customers in over 20 different countries. Its e-retail websites manage the upload of millions of customer images per day, surging to much higher levels ahead of seasonal gifting dates such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. PhotoBox uses Interoute VDC because it gives the company the control to pre-book, and provision on-demand the capacity required to ensure that despite periods of huge surges in online orders, users get a smooth, fast ordering experience at all times.

Graham Hobson, PhotoBox co-founder and MD Incubator commented, “As customer demand for PhotoBox’s innovative products continues to rapidly increase, we needed a smarter and more creative solution to support both the front and back-end of our growing online business. For our Paris operations in particular, we were looking at sending our data across hundreds of kilometres and back for processing, which would have really slowed down the website experience for our customers. We like the hybrid cloud model and Interoute has proved the perfect fit for us, delivering networked cloud infrastructure that is close to us, simple to provision, quick to scale and can be dedicated to us when we need it.”

PhotoBox Group uses a hybrid combination of colocation, cloud and private network to host its online business. By taking additional dedicated cloud resource in the Interoute VDC Paris and Amsterdam zones, the Group benefits from the highest transfer speeds by using extra server capacity close to its existing data centres and servers, reducing latency for its backend processes, and by plugging directly into Interoute’s 67,000 km, high capacity network, which gives optimised reach to website users across Europe and the world.

Matthew Finnie, CTO at Interoute added: “Our Interoute VDC is unique among IaaS platforms in that its 14 global cloud computing zones are pre-built into our advanced private network. This innovative combination of network and compute gives Photobox an automated global cloud which brings its customers and the Group’s European IT locations closer together, with a built-in guaranteed low latency network to help ensure the speed and performance of its online ordering services.”