"ServePath Creates Multi-server Solutions for Fast-growing Web 2.0 Company, PrepMe"
Situation
Gone are the days when students could cram for the SAT a few days before taking the college-entrance exam. As a record 1.6 million students take the SAT this year, and as four-year colleges and universities become more competitive and expensive than ever, high SAT scores are increasingly used to determine eligibility for admission and scholarships. Prepping for the SAT has never been more important – or easier – thanks to PrepMe, an online test preparation and college admissions service that specializes in test preparation for the SAT, PSAT and ACT.
But it wasn’t always this easy, according to Avichal Garg, co-founder and CTO at PrepMe. “We were a small startup that wanted to make education more efficient and personalized, but we didn’t want to build and manage the infrastructure required to deliver the service ourselves. Initially we chose an inexpensive managed hosting provider and quickly discovered that as our company grew, we needed a vendor that was more reliable and had a solid track record working with companies in similar, fast-paced online environments.”
Following the success of being named one of Business Week’s Top 25 Best Entrepreneurs Under 25 in 2006, and being featured in publications like The Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune Small Business Magazine and The Chicago Tribune, PrepMe’s business grew rapidly, and it quickly became apparent that their server infrastructure needed to grow as well.
Solution
PrepMe turned to ServePath because of their 10,000% Guaranteed® Service Level Agreement which provides customers 100 minutes of service credit for every minute of downtime. “Worrying about our IT infrastructure took time and money away from our core business. We wanted a proven hosting organization, and ServePath was the only company that could guarantee that our test prep and tutorials are available 24/7 for a reasonable cost,” said PrepMe’s Garg.
The goal was to develop a highly customized solution that would easily scale to accommodate the company’s current and future needs. ServePath presented PrepMe with a High Availability Server Network solution, a redundant and cost-effective hosting environment that utilizes load balancing techniques to prevent downtime. This means that if a web server experiences a hardware or software problem, it is taken out of the server cluster, and future traffic is not directed to it until it comes back online and is integrated back into the cluster.
Results
It is benefits like these that are crucial for an online Web 2.0 business like PrepMe: “Our business is conducted entirely online with kids taking our online Flash tutorials, communicating with their tutors etc, so downtime is not an option for us. Our web site needs to be running 24/7 which is why we decided to scale our server infrastructure from a single dedicated server to a server network with several web servers and a load balancer.” explains Garg. “PrepMe currently has about 15,000 users, but every year about 2 million kids take the SAT, both in the US and internationally, and it is our goal to reach as many of these kids as we can. We need a server network that can handle the increase in traffic, and that can easily scale as our business grows even more. As we look to expand our offerings to include social networking capabilities, our bandwidth requirements will also increase, and it will be imperative that we are entrusting our site to experts like ServePath. We couldn’t be happier.”
About PrepMe
PrepMe, Inc. is an innovative start-up in the field of online education, test preparation, and high school to college transition services. They created a course that not only teaches students how to outsmart the test, but teaches them all the underlying knowledge along with how to accelerate their reading, comprehend more, memorize better, and study more effectively. The result: an SAT I course that averages a 300 point increase per student, PrepMe became the SAT preparation of choice for all public high school students in the state of Maine starting in 2007.
About ServePath
ServePath is a leading dedicated server provider and hosting specialist, providing custom solutions and managed services for businesses that need a powerful Internet hosting platform. Thousands of companies worldwide look to ServePath for its reliability, customization, and speed. ServePath also provides colocation services through its ColoServe division. The employee-owned company has been in business for six years, with offices and its own data center in San Francisco, one of the world’s top Internet centers.