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Introduction
Childhood illness is often bewildering and frightening. For the 1.7 million UK children every year who go into hospital and many more who see their GPs, an essential and valuable alleviation is ready access to comprehensive, age-appropriate information. |
Based at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Children First for Health project offers child health information to young people of all ages through its web site. Over 3,500 children from 30 countries have contributed to the website which is available in 11 different languages and now attracts over 5 million hits each month.
The Challenge
With the web site's rapid growth and the development of various on-line services, a comprehensive and highly reliable hosting service with accessible maintenance and technical support services was of critical importance to the project. Being a not-for-profit organisation the hosting solution also needed to be affordable, yet not restrict future expansion plans.
The Solution
A Hyper Velocity dedicated server was chosen to host the site. The server has ample storage capacity for the site together with its supporting data, whilst RAID disk mirroring ensures that service is not interrupted and data is not lost should a disk failure occur. The service level agreement offered with the server guarantees 100% network uptime and engineer attendance within five minutes.
The machine was supplied pre configured with a comprehensive suite of software including Apache web server and a feature rich PHP installation enabling Great Ormond Street to get the Children First For Health site up and running in minimal time. |
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Donhost takes care of server maintenance and monitoring, including the application of security patches and software upgrades whilst the project staff are able to administrate the server through its web based control panel. This combination removes the need for an in-house system administrator and allows the hosting environment to be configured quickly, saving the project both money and time.
 Donhost have been exceptional. Staff are always available to answer our questions by email or phone which takes the worry out of managing our own server. The most striking change from our previous service is that we used to experience a 30% downtime rate due to server maintenance! With Donhost we now have a 100% connectivity guarantee and finding our website offline is now a thing of the past. We would highly recommend Donhost to other businesses looking for a web hosting partner. 
Karoline Cheung
Children First For Health
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The Future
The site's accessible information all carries the NHS brand, a 'kite mark' of quality and reliability, setting Children First for Health apart from the vast range of other health information outlets. Children First for Health is fast becoming the definitive child health information provider and both the site's resources and traffic levels are growing rapidly.
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Ample storage capacity for new information and data is offered by the Hyper Velocity server's RAID disk array, whilst its powerful processor offers significant margin for additional growth in traffic levels.
Donhost maintains a stock of pre configured servers which allows a customer's order to be fulfilled instantly and owns its own data centre and network which has massive capacity, most of which is unused. The project enjoys complete security through the knowledge that additional servers and bandwidth capacity may be added quickly should the site's popularity increase unexpectedly quickly. |
Software upgrades are included as a standard part of the management service offered with the Hyper Velocity server allowing the site to take advantage of the latest technologies as they become available. Donhost will also be able to install any additional software requested by Children First For Health, ensuring that the solution is truly future proof.
More Information
Dedicated Servers
Service Level Agreement
Children First For Health - http://www.childrenfirst.nhs.uk
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