Q1 2021

6 | Q1 2021 Nov20257 A Host of Success! The market for web hosting has become saturated over the last few years, as companies and businesses search desperately for their own hosting solutions. When Dennis Nind started Brixly, he wanted to create something that offered a high-quality solution for the reseller market. We take a look at how this small business became known as the Best Independent Web Hosting Brand 2020 in the Midlands Enterprise Awards 2020. Over the last few years, the need for businesses to have a website has become a necessity as opposed to a perk. Those who do not exist on the Internet don’t have any hold at all. Of course, to have a presence on the web, it’s essential to have a web host. For Dennis Nind, opening up new opportunities for people to host their own content on the Internet was an essential first step into a new life. In 2014, Dennis left his full-time position for a life of freelance work. Having started life as a designer, he had progressed through to full-stack development and eventually systems administration, working alongside some of the world’s leading brands in e-commerce. Web hosting was something he not only knew about, but understood the value of, especially when it came to his customers. Dennis’ customers wanted, and deserved, the very best. This meant providing fantastic management and SEO services alongside a fast, reliable and robust web hosting solution. Unfortunately, it proved difficult to secure a web host who was able to live up to the high standards that Dennis and his customers expected. Many hosting solutions were overpriced and of poor quality, and there were no independent offerings as most had been acquired by larger groups. With no challengers on the market, Dennis made his move with Brixly, and it has become an enormous success. He took an approach that matched the standards he had experienced with ‘enterprise-grade’ solutions, offering him immense scalability. As the business grew, he was determined not to be caught out. This futureproofing technique has paid off, with Brixly able to maintain the highest of standards while gaining an initial client base. Building the service himself meant that Dennis took the entire enterprise into his own hands, and he spent a great deal of time and effort perfecting a hosting platform that would help to shape the business into what it has become. The stack was designed from the ground up to offer world- beating performance, using the various contacts that he had made over the years to ensure his solution was the best it could be. Every aspect of the hosting platform was tweaked and refined to offer leading-edge technology, scalability, and unbeatable performance. This single virtual server acted as the template to a number of physical machines co-located in Coventry. All clients were swiftly moved to this new system and since then, Dennis and the team at Brixly have never looked back. They now host more than 250,000 domains for clients in 136+ countries, with hardware across the world in the UK, Germany and the USA. As the business has grown, Dennis has had to employ a staff who share his passion for the business, and this shown by how effectively the small team tackle over 6,500 support inquiries monthly. Within the industry, they offer an exceptional service that champions response times above all else. Of course, in a rapidly changing world, Dennis and his team have had to take care to ensure that their pioneering solution remains well ahead of the game. There is no sitting back from the team, who are always looking for the latest challenges on the horizon. One of the biggest is that of cybersecurity, which has been fascinating and challenging in equal measure. The ability of individuals to hack into what have previously been considered secure servers is something that the team are determined to avoid. As such, there has been a recent internal restructure to implement the award-winning ‘BitNinja’ security solution to the entire network. Those who use Brixly can rest easy knowing that their web hosting solution is safe now, and will continue to be so. The result of this decision has made it much easier to navigate any problems that arise. Most security issues can be handled from a single screen, with the team easily able to monitor track and analyse an attack in real-time. So far, this rollout has had an incredible impact on businesses, with approximately 175,000 infected files / malicious scripts stopped from affecting a website. This was achieved with 0 reported false-positives, which is a major step forward for security providers. Brixly has long been committed to providing the highest quality solutions on the market, and this latest achievement is another which reassures clients of the team’s standards. While ensuring security is obviously key to success, so too is finding ways of making what Brixly offers more performance-friendly. The team have been monitoring this sector of the market too, building their own caching solution called ‘Bolt-Cache’. This has undergone extensive testing and comparison, and remains unbeaten in terms of performance, even against the world’s leading technology stacks. The team have done this by allowing clients to serve their dynamic content as ‘static’, directly from RAM as opposed to disk-based storage. This is a service available to all clients on their premium tier, inclusive of their package. None of this would have been possible without the world of open-source technology, which has democratised a lot of how the technology sector works. Open-source solutions play an extraordinary role in the running of the team’s technology stack, and it’s a credit to the thousands of developers who continue to contribute to such projects that it runs so smoothly. By combining the efforts of so many people, it has been possible to create a platform that is reliable, robust, and secure. Such a success could only come from a team that has the space and the drive to innovate. The need for webhosting solutions has never been more acute, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this fact. Dennis and his team have watched clients face incredible challenges to their finances as business has fallen away. The use of the Internet has only increased during the crisis, meaning that the team has been in constant demand. Many have lost much throughout the crisis, and every industry has been affected in some way, shape or form. The future, however, seems bright. The value of webhosting is clear, with businesses seeing it as an essential part of what they offer. This demand will only increase as people get back on their feet and start to explore new ways of working. The world is constantly changing, and it is essential that businesses change with it. The work of Brixly keeps businesses moving