Software That Never Sleeps – Roeville Reservation Software
Services: Colocation, SaaS infrastructure, load balancing and consultancy
For over 20 years, Roeville Reservation Software has been supplying computerised reservation systems for the coach and bus industry and has solutions for operators of all sizes and budgets. Roeville’s software includes high performance coach tour/private hire reservation systems and professional e-commerce solutions.
Roeville’s Webres.net product uses Microsoft’s cutting edge technology to deliver the ultimate internet reservation system for coach and tour operators. Using Commidea Card Handling Services and the power of .Net, the system is capable of handling thousands of simultaneous page hits and bookings.
Over the past six years the company has used this technology to provide tour operators with a web presence to help drive their businesses forward. Indeed, products from across the Roeville Reservation Software range have been adopted by a host of flagship operators in the UK as John Roe, Managing Director of Roeville explains:
"We provide systems which are the culmination of years of experience in the software and tour business, and as a result, our software is the natural choice of many of the country's leading coach tour operators including National Holidays, Grand UK Holidays and TheCoachHoliday.com".
The challenge
Richard Andrews, IT and Web Manager at Roeville outlines what the company wanted to achieve and why:
Richard continues: "Roeville Reservation Software prides itself in providing a quality web e-Commerce solution at a fair and reasonable cost. To deliver this, it's crucial that our websites are hosted on a fast, high-uptime, high-value hosting platform. We have used several hosting companies in the past, and have always struggled to find a provider that has been able to deliver a reliable solution that's also tailored to our requirements. This has generally been a result of a host's unwillingness to customise a solution to specifically meet our needs, or simply their lack of expertise to implement our ideas.
"Our customer commitment at Roeville was to implement a more robust network of web servers that provided a load balanced solution with failover in the case of server down-time."
The solution
"We already knew about load balancers and started looking at the market to quickly find that these devices were too expensive for us and beyond the budget of a small company like ours. We decided to speak to our existing host, 1st Easy, to see if they could help. Rather than the usual sales pitch that most companies would give us they actually listened to our needs and fully understood that we had a budget to work within. As it turns out, for a small investment in some of the equipment we already had, we could achieve our goal and for a lot less money than we’d originally thought."
Following a consultation to establish the goals of the potential project, 1st Easy designed and deployed a load balancing architecture that addressed the key points of Roeville's objective to improve service to their customers. Stephen Bell, Managing Director at 1st Easy explains:
"The solution optimises the performance of Roeville's web applications by intelligently distributing traffic across a cluster of their servers. We were also able to improve the resilience of the service by designing the system to detect and manage hardware failure. So, if one of the servers in the cluster develops a fault, traffic is automatically redirected to the remaining healthy servers. As a result, users of Roeville's online services are not aware of any downtime."
Freeing up time that would otherwise be wasted chasing and resolving technical issues, an additional benefit of the new arrangement is summarised by John:
"The fact that the 1st Easy hosting solution has provided us with an excellent service throughout makes it easier for us to concentrate on our product and business development. Roeville has a strong relationship with 1st Easy and we know we can rely on their fair and vast knowledge within the hosting market."
Roeville: Finding out more
To find out more about Roeville, please contact Richard Andrews, IT/Web Manager on 01302 841 333. Further information is also available at: www.roeville.com.