Bernd Hilmar has been in the web hosting business since 1999 when he created his first startup in Vienna, Austria. After selling that company in 2015, Bernd was bitten once again by the entrepreneurial bug. Two years later, he launched Romania-based Virtexxa Cloud Services, which offers web hosting under the flagship brand, ihost24.
Along with managed hosting services, Virtexxa provides complementary offerings such as email services, IaaS, PaaS, and domain name registration and management. “One of my objectives, when I started Virtexxa, was to keep the company focused on doing what we do best—web, domain, and email hosting services,” said Bernd. “I knew it didn’t make sense to run cloud infrastructure ourselves when there were already really good infrastructure services out there. Plus, we wanted a sophisticated control panel and didn’t want to create it ourselves.”
What might come as a surprise is how Bernd found Linode. “I was doing a Google search, and the first thing I noticed was how Linode’s website helps developers get essential information; that told me a lot about the company’s priorities and its service-oriented culture,” he said.
“Of course, we comparison shopped too. AWS was far more expensive, and its pricing policies were not clear at all, whereas Linode’s pricing structure is easy to understand.”
Bernd quickly became a big proponent of the Linode Cloud Manager, which provides a user-friendly interface to create new Linode instances, manage infrastructure, user accounts, billing and payments, and to open and track support tickets. Built atop Linode’s public APIv4, all of Linode’s products and services, including Kubernetes clusters, backups, One-Click Apps, Object Storage, and more, are accessible from the Cloud Manager control panel.
In addition to price and performance, reliability is critical to Virtexxa, especially when it needs to rapidly scale web services to support a mobile marketing game for one of its web design clients, which represents a major fast-food company in Austria. The majority of Virtexxa’s customers are in Romania, Austria, and Germany. The company runs all of its main managed services on Linode using data centers in Frankfurt, London, and Newark, depending upon client needs.
“They send seasonal push messages to 800,000 customers, so traffic gets really high, really fast, with more than 10,000 connections per second,” explained Bernd. To handle the influx of traffic, Virtexxa worked with Linode to create a solution using two Linode NodeBalancers, which automatically handle increases in load and ensure websites are highly available.
Bernd is also impressed with Linode’s ongoing commitment to 24/7/365 customer service and how reliable it is despite being separated by six time zones. “Support from Linode is fast and accurate,” he said. “They also never give us a templated answer. It’s very well-organized, well-structured, and proactive.”
Bernd advises, “If you care about reliability and service, you can’t go wrong with Linode,” he said. “It’s a win-win for us and our clients.”
