November and December – months of challenges and great opportunities

19.11.2018
Outsourcing of IT infrastructure
Author: Atman

Last months of the year is a time filled with promotions. Extremely attractive short-term offers are prepared by online stores for so-called Black Friday or even Black Week. However, special offers are also directed towards e-shops, for example for the lease of dedicated servers. They are prepared by IT and telecommunications service providers with a view to support the e-commerce industry during this period of intensive work and technological challenges. Right now is a good opportunity to look at provides and take advantage of several offers using the 2018 budget.

Promotion on the Internet is not just about marketing and sales

It should be borne in mind that it is not enough to plan a promotional campaign in terms of marketing. In anticipation of a lot more than usual traffic in the e-shop, it is crucial to ensure the right IT infrastructure. Otherwise, it may be impossible to service short-term promotions on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. that heavily burden servers and their Internet connections. If the IT infrastructure is too weak, the shop website will become unavailable when too many customers will try to make purchases  at the same time.

How to quickly, easily and effectively increase your IT resources

You can of course buy another server and insert it in the company’s server room or “under the desk”. But what will happen with it after the promotional season? Will it be useful for something, or will it just lay around and collect dust? Will the costs of its purchase and maintenance be returned?

Maybe it will be more profitable to choose a short-term lease of IT resources from a trusted technology partner?

Providers know about this seasonal growth in the e-commerce infrastructure needs and are ready to provide additional servers and broadband links for periods of several months. There are even those who themselves prepare price cuts to encourage e-shops to use their offer. It’s enough to have a good look at the market.

For example, on Black Friday 2018, Atman launched a promotion for dedicated servers: 40% discount on the server lease price for a max. of 3 months. The proposed 3 configurations vary in terms of computing power, but all are maintained in a professional data center with a guaranteed power supply of 99.999% and a reliable internet connection. The provider also provides specialist advice and technical support 24/7, as well as SLA for quick replacement of damaged components or the entire device.

Thanks to the unique offer of Atman, the online shop can easily increase the power of its IT only for the time of the e-commerce harvests: St. Nicholas’ Day, Christmas presents, January Christmas shopping boom and finally Valentine’s Day. The promotion will last only until the end of November.

End of the year – IT companies fight for clients

It’s worth earmarking a part of the company’s IT budget for the last months of the year, and this does not apply only to the e-commerce industry. During this time there are many promotions, for example in Cyber Monday, when many devices can be purchased even at half price, so the savings can be significant.

Another type of seasonal deals are exceptionally attractive terms of long-term contracts for IT or telecommunications services. Companies from the ICT industry are aware that in this period many companies end their contracts with existing providers. Therefore, they prepare special offers to convince them to change the service provider and select their offer.

Monthly savings up to PLN 1000

It was at the beginning of November this year that Atman has made significant changes to the service of dedicated server lease. First, it refreshed virtually all configurations of the offered servers. Now, even in the simplest configurations, Atman provides double disks to allow redundancy, and hence – uninterrupted operation. In turn, in configurations with stronger processors, the operating memory level has been increased to provide customers with even higher performance. Intel Xeon Scalable processors – which until now were available only on request – are a novelty in the standard offer.

We structured our current offer in a way that should satisfy both customers with low requirements regarding computing power, as well as those in need of extensive, dedicated solutions. In both variants, the provided infrastructure is highly failure-free and can be modified on the spot,” comments Robert Mikołajski from Atman.

Atman also modified the business terms of server lease: it introduced two new terms of contract (6 and 36 months), and restored the possibility of buying servers online for an indefinite term. Particularly attractive changes concern contracts for 12 months, 24 and 36 months – clients receive larger discounts than before. These benefits are not only intended for loyal clients who receive upgraded antiDDoS protection packages and additional data transfer packages for PLN 1 per month. Depending on the duration of the contract, in the case of an average size server, the savings generated on additional options and discounts range from PLN 175 to more than PLN 1000 a month, which often exceeds the monthly value of server lease.

The changes in the offer are not only to support our existing clients, but also to attract new ones. By introducing the indefinite-term contract, we wanted to give them the opportunity to check out the quality of our service. On the other hand, clients who decide to cooperate with us for at least 6 months will receive additional benefits as a token of appreciation for trusting us for a longer period of time,” underlines Robert Mikołajski from Atman.

Summary

Companies find it increasingly difficult to rely solely on their own resources, especially with the growing shortage of specialists and market pressure to cut costs. More and more often, instead of buying own servers, business decides to hire equipment and specialists, especially during seasonal growth in demand for IT infrastructure, like in the case of the e-commerce industry at the turn of the year. Therefore, trusted technology partners – such as Atman – are sought.