Hosting Company Expands Services, Ensures Uptime, and Slashes Costs With Virtualization

Santa Barbara Web Hosting (SBWH) provides enterprise-class managed services to nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized customers. Like many hosting providers, SBWH was challenged with rising power costs, limited resources, and long build times. The company, which was in danger of having to turn away new customers, or losing existing contracts, because it couldn't access enough affordable power fast enough, sought an efficient way to manage servers for a growing customer base while ensuring reliable, cost-effective offerings. Using Microsoft solutions, including Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the company is now realizing an average annual operational savings of U.S.$315,000, and can offer customers more expansive services at a lower monthly fee, ensure high availability, and provision new servers in just minutes.