Natural Insight develops and markets proprietary workforce management and data collection software for industries with large-scale and widely distributed workforces. The company’s flagship product, Natural Insight™, is a fully integrated suite of online management tools that streamline scheduling, tracking, and reporting of large-scale projects performed at multiple geographic locations. Natural Insight's hosting model allows their clients to minimize their technology investment while improving their overall performance and accountability.

Excellence is a State of Mind
When Natural Insight first contacted Hosting.com, they stressed how important its hosting environment is to the company’s core business and explained that it is critical for achieving business success. Natural Insight also was concerned that the level of their service has significantly declined shortly after their hosting provider was acquired by a mass marketing hosting company.

“We began experiencing major issues with our equipment and we could not get responses or explanations as to what was going on,” explained Paul Carney, Natural Insight VP of Technical Services. “Our level of service was rapidly declining just as our hosting requirements were rising due to increased demands for our Natural Insight software solution.”

Natural Insight is developed in ColdFusion®, which its previous hosting provider could not support because it did not have any ColdFusion experts on staff. As a result, Natural Insight hosting provider was unable to meet its expectations. Worst of all, Natural Insight’s clients began experiencing intermittent delays in their Natural Insight product due to software instability.

“Our clients need 24/7 access to Natural Insight so that they could upload their data, manage their workload, and pull information as they needed it” said Carney. “The combination of the falling service and the ColdFusion® software instability made us step back and rethink our position.”

Getting Natural Insight Back on Track
Carney began searching for a new hosting provider that was more in tune with their ColdFusion® management needs, which provided responsive support packaged in a creative solution that could expand with their client base requirements. Carney pared the list down to two hosting providers.

“Our interaction with Hosting.com’s sales staff was the determining factor,” said Carney. “When I posed difficult questions to the sales staff, I didn’t just get a ‘oh let me find out’ type of response. The salesperson immediately connected me with a technician who was able to give us the information we needed then and there,” said Carney.

“We have 26,000 users across all of our client databases, and the majority of them log in once a week,” said Carney. “We have 18,000 daily users who log in to our databases to record their time. If they cannot access the system, they cannot be paid. We needed a host provider that understood the importance of our software and who were available to our clients on a 24/7 basis.”

Hosting.com is Not Just any Hosting Provider
Hosting.com’s dedicated server engineers worked with Natural Insight to create a custom dedicated hosting solution that included load-balanced application servers with a database and a file server on the side. Natural Insight and Hosting.com developed a plan – based on the solid growth of Natural Insight's Natural Insight™ software – that took into consideration Natural Insight's plans to increase its database capabilities by expanding it storage needs into a storage area network (SAN).

Since collaborating with Hosting.com, Natural Insight has grown to six load-balanced servers isolated behind a secure firewall. The company has upgraded its database server and migrated to the SAN. Hosting.net was able to help Natural Insight meet its goals by creating a plan that allowed Natural Insight to scale up from its initial solution to its current configuration. It did this by understanding what Natural Insight expected from a hosting solution –a provider who could help them develop a plan that allowed them to expand their client base as the company grows and that provided built in fault tolerance without necessitating the creation of duplicate systems in different geographic locations.

“Moving to Hosting.com has enabled us to spend our time, money and people on other things like building the software and not on our infrastructure,” commented Carney.