HolidayIQ, India's most popular travel community website leverages on Netmagic's Managed Hosting Services to cater to its ever-expanding customer base.

Company Profile

Launched in 2004 under the name of India Resorts Survey, HolidayIQ.com is India's largest online travel community. HolidayIQ is owned and operated by Leisure & Lifestyle Information Services Private Limited, based in Bangalore. The website is powered by actual traveler feedback on holiday destinations and accommodation across India contributed by members of this community. The website today lists over 7500 hotels and 350 destinations spread across all Indian states and Union Territories. It is by far the most comprehensive source of information, user reviews, prices and packages for hotels, resorts and other accommodation options in India.

Google has chosen HolidayIQ to provide user generated content, specifically hotel reviews and hotel photographs to Google's India local search. This service will go live in early 2008. HolidayIQ has more than one lakh registered members. The site's popularity can be gauged from the fact that it attracted its five millionth visitor recently.

Requirement & Challenges:

Initially, the company used spreadsheets to collect data. But this was not a scalable solution considering the swelling traffic and rise in membership and activities on the site. Another issue was that traffic peaked at certain times especially on days leading to the beginning of the holiday season. Therefore, ramping up the IT system infrastructure to keep pace with HolidayIQ's growth was the logical progression. They realized the need for a datacenter that could offer higher levels of service in terms of scalability, availability and performance. With IT infrastructure getting increasingly complex and requiring significant investment, the way forward was to move to a data center to reduce total cost of ownership ensuring revenues are available for business expansion.

Requirements - scalability of hardware and software in order to take care of expected growth scalability of operations and support Near hands-off approach to website hosting and related infrastructure management India based hosting service Adequate skills with the provider to ensure performance of website

Netmagic - the solution for a stable IT environment.

The team at HolidayIQ decided against investing in their own data center and infrastructure since it would mean considerable overheads in terms of cost and hiring of IT staff to maintain the systems. It was decided that a hosted service would be the right way to go. They homed in on Netmagic Solutions to cater to their requirements in 2005.

"The decision to transition to Netmagic's servers was part of HolidayIQ's evolution," says MR Prabhakar, CTO, HolidayIQ . As HolidayIQ continues to add more members, the company's executives are able to focus on their core business and expansion plans while Netmagic provides a scalable and reliable Managed Hosting Solution that is customized to its requirements.

Netmagic is equipped with a world-class IDC, 24x7 Network Operations Center (NOC), and Helpdesk, available around the clock to resolve and attend to any calls. The service is backed by an SLA offering industry-leading uptimes and is equally ideal for enterprises like HolidayIQ looking to host its mission critical web based services.

Services include:

website hosting (dedicated server hosting) server support and management firewall management database management mail relay services with antivirus and bulk mailing

In sync with expansion

HolidayIQ has many plans on its anvil such as adding more features and forging alliances with other organizations for content sharing and revenue generation. The company proposes to offer video streaming for its members soon and expects its membership to double by May 2008.

All this would mean that the system capacity would need to be scaled even further. Having experienced Netmagic's seasoned expertise in hosting, the company plans to double its hosting infrastructure soon.

Mr. Prabhakar, CTO, HolidayIQ is satisfied with Netmagic's service and says that their company is able to focus on its core competencies while leaving the hosting and infrastructure management to Netmagic.

"By partnering with Netmagic, we have been able to maintain a near hands-off approach to our website hosting. By transferring the onus of site performance, uptime and scalability to Netmagic, we have been able to focus on our core competencies, that of fostering a community of travelers and of building user generated content. By not having to invest in hosting skills, we have built skills in our core areas of design, development and content generation."

Business Benefits

• ability to focus on core business
• been able to address increase in traffic without any impact
• ease in scaling up operations seamlessly
• achieved high degree of uptime
• invested in core skills instead of technical skills related to hosting
• ability to concentrate on business processes rather than hosting related processes