BOOKIT

Availability for the best short trips

Just like the traditional summer and winter sports vacations, the short “in between” vacations are increasingly booked online. Bookit has realized this and since 1999 has been active in offering cheap, short holidays online. Bookit is currently the market leader in the Netherlands and offers inexpensive, short vacations online in collaboration with more than 2500 hotels and 550 bungalow parks in Europe. 60,000 unique visitors per day who are all looking for the best and cheapest short break.

And with success. Bookit handles approximately 375,000 reservations for more than 1 million holidaymakers through its websites every year. In addition, Bookit sends a newsletter to all 1 million customers every week to keep them informed of the best offers. This is a challenging job that greatly increases the pressure on the technical environment. This requires a solid platform on which traffic flows can take place smoothly. After all, an offline website results in much missed revenue.

The solution

In order to be able to process the large flow of visitors and the many online reservations without any problems and to guarantee the stability of the various websites, Basefarm has developed a redundant dedicated hosting solution for the various Bookit websites since 2011. For this, Basefarm has put together a unique combination of hardware, operating systems and databases, as well as various additional backup and monitoring services, so that the hosting solution perfectly matches Bookit’s services; fast and reliable.
Because the weekly Bookit newsletter puts a lot of extra pressure on the technical environment, Basefarm has set up a fully dedicated mail relay through which newsletters and other e-mails can be sent quickly, without the risk of unintended downtime due to overloading. Basefarm has designed the environment in such a way that the servers are not directly connected to this relay, but are connected to each other via a virtual IP address. This ensures maximum availability of the back office systems and, above all, ensures maximum stability of the environment as a whole.

The result

Bookit has a technical platform that fully meets the requirements regarding availability and stability. The high pressure on the technical platform as a result of the many visits to the website and the high e-mail traffic is limited to a minimum. The stability of the website is therefore maximum. Customers thus always have availability over a wide range of short trips.

“Met een krachtige en veilige hostingoplossing voor onze websites en backoffice systemen, stelt Basefarm ons in staat om ons volledig te richten op waar wij echt goed in zijn.”