At ICO we are passionate about our support and customer service, not just from our highly knowledge technical team, but throughout the business, from sales and marketing to operations.

Our prime goal is to always add value for new prospective clients (and our existing clients), from the perspective of offering not only a sound technical solution, but also a cost effective solution.

We recently received an enquiry from a new client who was running two, three year old servers in a Melbourne based data center, under a Co-Location arrangement.

The client, who was based in Sydney, initially asked if ICO could provide a Co-Location arrangement for these servers in our Sydney data center, as the arrangement in Melbourne was becoming very problematic from an ongoing administration and support perspective.

Whilst ICO does not generally offer Co-Location services, during the course of the initial discussion we became aware this client faced some very significant problems in managing their IT environment, namely:-
 

• The existing servers were quite old and the customer was faced with a looming decision to incur additional high cost capital expenditure to replace them
   
• They had to carry the cost for 2 servers because the business model was critical and therefore they needed to run a replicated “hot standby” server to cover the potential of a production server failure 
• They were faced with the challenge of finding a competent organisation who could provide backup support/maintenance for the hardware and software
• Apart from their own specialist supply chain management application, they used a Plesk control panel to manage multiple web sites and a Mail Enable server for email.  Day to day management and administration of both Plesk and Mail Enable was a major problem for them as they had no one on staff capable of handling this role.  Subsequently, they had suffered periods of downtime in the past due to a lack of local technical knowledge on these products. 

Once the scale of the clients challenges became clear, our account manager was able to recommend an approach that resolved all the issues in a very cost effective manner.  For less than $800/mth, we were able to offer this client (and they accepted) a fully managed hosting package covering:

• A fully managed server running on our VMWare ESX Infrastructure,
• live support engineer 24 x 7 support,
• full dynamic failover capability (dispensing with the client’s need to run 2 dedicated servers),
• full daily managed backup,
• full Anti Virus management and
• complete management of all Operating System software.
• An ICO fully managed service to look after the administration and management of both Plesk and Mail Enable.