Case Studies

• Gristedes - Perimeter Email Protection (PEP)
• Brookhaven Press LLC Case Study
• Widelity Case Study
• MySpaceToolBox.com

Gristedes - Perimeter Email Protection (PEP)

Corner Grocer Attacks Big Spam Problem and Protects Business-Critical Email

Background

Established in 1888, Gristedes has been feeding hungry New Yorkers for over 100 years. Known for their high quality food, produce and gourmet food items they have become a favorite of New Yorkers and celebrities.  The store has been featured in episodes of Seinfeld and Will and Grace and praised by food connoisseurs.  Today, Gristedes boasts over 50 stores in the New York City and surrounding areas, as well as a growing online retail site.  As the company has expanded so has the need to develop an efficient messaging and communications solutions.

Problem

In 2006, Gristedes experienced a surge of repeated Denial of Service (DOS), spam, pharming and phishing attacks.  As the volume increased, it threatened to shut down the company’s viable email ordering system.  Gristedes was hit with 2,000 spam attempts a minute at the height of this problem.  As a result, Gristedes email servers were spending so much time filtering email within the DOS attacks that the email queue backed up causing serious degradation.  The company estimated that email users were devoting roughly 16 seconds to identifying and deleting each spam email which was calculated to cost the grocer $1,000 per employee each year in loss of productivity.

Capabilities Needed

Gristedes needed a scalable, redundant, and reliable email protection system to ensure that all 350 email systems would not be victims of spam and other malicious activities.   One hundred percent uptime, as well as ease-of-use was key.  The company evaluated many options before selecting Concentric’s Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) solution.

Solution

Concentric’s PEP is a complete suite of email server security applications designed to protect small-to-medium businesses from malicious spam, email viruses, and DOS attacks.  The service’s ability to stop spam and email-based attacks at the perimeter, can reduce email load and spam by 90 percent or more.  PEP prevents spam, viruses, directory harvesting, denial-of-service or dictionary attacks, fraud, phishing schemes, and other crippling email attacks from reaching email servers.  PEP and PEP Filtering ensures that only clean, valid, and properly addressed email is sent to company email servers for final delivery.

PEP provides Gristedes with a redundant protection solution to battle the ever-increasing problems that spam and DOS attacks pose to online retailers today.  By using the speed of the internet, DNS exchanges, and the company’s internal networks, Gristedes was able to frame Concentric PEP as an anti-spam and anti-invalid user barrier around their enterprise infrastructure. Simultaneously, PEP provided the company with an efficient and cost-effective email system backup

Benefits

“Concentric PEP has served flawlessly as our frontline of defense in blocking DOS attacks and eliminating the high ‘bogus’ user email volumes we were experiencing.  With over 300 email system users, spam not only wreaked havoc with our systems, but spam had a tremendous financial impact to our operations.  we enabled PEP we immediately saw a drop from over 60,000 emails a day to less than 8,000 a day.  Our mail server is back to running fast and efficiently.  Since our business includes online retail sales, we cannot afford to lose even one customer email communication.  With PEP we have the peace of mind that all our emails will be stored if our email server goes down,” said Don Winant, Gristedes’ CIO.

Gristedes estimates that they stand to realize a $350,000 increase in manpower productivity by utilizing Concentric’s PEP.  This not only translates to actual savings, but significantly speeds the timely processing of online orders and customer email communications which are vital to the continued success of Gristedes.    

Brookhaven Press LLC Case Study

Brookhaven Press Chooses Concentric for Exceptional Services and Reliable Support

Problem

Since 1985, Brookhaven Press has produced award-winning business and career books, web sites, and specialty market publications. The publishing house relies on a web hosting provider to support both the company and its sponsored sites. In 2007, the importance of reliability became painfully clear when its web hosting provider crashed several times causing its largest income-generating sites to lose their Google rankings. During these downtimes, the hosting provider’s technical support proved novice and had difficulty correcting its server and upload issues. Because of this —and the months required to regain Google rankings—Brookhaven Press began searching for a reliable provider with outstanding applications, services, and support.

The company’s expectations and requirements were clear. With a limited technical staff, it needed a knowledgeable hosting provider fluent in leading technology, that was responsive and easy to work with, and could help achieve and sustain top online rankings. In addition to solid, scaleable solutions, the new provider had to view itself as a member of the publisher’s internal IT team.

Solution

After extensive evaluation, Concentric^® was chosen because of its service offerings, knowledgeable staff, educated technical support, and reliable platforms which allow companies of every size to easily upgrade as business expands.

Working together, the two companies customized a web hosting plan that would sustain the publishing house’s online presence, increase web traffic and performance, and provide necessary support. Brookhaven was extremely impressed with Concentric’s Clustered Hosting Architecture, a patented technology platform that delivers America’s most reliable hosting with greater speed, performance, and security than any other provider. With Concentric’s unique Clustered Hosting technology configuration, the publisher was given inexhaustible server resources with multiple tiers of security including intelligent routing, redundant switching fabric, built-in firewall, and proxy technology.

Results

In May of 2008, the company’s sponsored web site, Healthcare Jobs www.healthcarejobs.org, was moved to Concentric’s Clustered Hosting service.  

“The transition was seamless,” said Dennis V. Damp, president of Brookhaven Press.  “Concentric’s technical staff is experienced, knowledgeable, and easy to work with. It feels like they really care about the services they offer and our desires.  Also, the guaranteed uptime is impressive. After the move, we noticed a 20% increase in both web traffic and revenue, which we attribute directly to Concentric’s cluster server load balancing configuration.”

In addition to immediate results and premium technical support, the company was impressed by availability of expanded services not obtainable through any other web hosting provider.  

When the publisher transitioned its second sponsored web site, Federal Retirement Planning www.federalretirement.net, to Concentric, it saw the same results. As a result, Brookhaven Press will migrate the majority of its sponsored web sites to Concentric’s Clustered Hosting platform before the end of the year.

“It’s an easy decision,” concluded Damp. “They deliver premium service and the skilled technical support our business demands. Too few hosting companies actually deliver the quality and support Concentric provides.”

Widelity Case Study

Widelity Selects Concentric to Create an Effective Custom and Affordable Online Presence for Nextlink Communications.

Problem

Widelity deploys mission-critical IT solutions and provides design, deployment, and operation services for communication networks as well as integrated applications that improve productivity. Its client, Nextlink™ Wireless is a provider of broadband services to both wireless and wireline communications service markets. The company engaged Widelity to develop two critical online assets—its reseller portal and an ecommerce tool called LMDSXchange. It had been using email, faxes and a WIKI to communicate with resellers but a fast-changing market required a more flexible, dedicated solution. new reseller site had to be reliable, secure, manageable, and highly cost effective. 

Nextlink’s LMDSXchange (www.LMDSXchange.com) facilitated online transactions between LMDS providers and potential licensors. The Web site manages a one-stop-shop for service providers and vendors for the 28GHz spectrum. Like the reseller portal, the new LMDSXchange had to be reliable, secure, and affordable. both projects, maintenance would be initially outsourced but had to be simple enough to eventually be managed internally.   

Challenges 

Widelity determined it needed a Web solution that would deliver Nextlink’s short-term go-to-market strategy and still meet long-term security and manageability business requirements. The LMDSXchange had to meet specific ecommerce requirements, collect information for FCC filings, and provide dynamic pre qualification tools and services to verify potential LMDS point-to-point links. As a nationwide one-stop-shop for LMDS spectrum, it required the development of extensive services for a variety of organizations. In addition to scalability and reliability, the sites had to expand as the company and its market grew. The ultimate platform and service provider had to meet a complex, phased implementation strategy. 

Solution

After extensive review of Web service providers, Widelity selected Concentric® for the reseller and LMDSXchange sites because of its reputation, experienced development staff, and proven reliability and security of its platforms. Concentric’s Professional Web Services are specifically designed for small and medium businesses requiring a turnkey solution for building and maintaining a strong Web presence. 

Widelity and Concentric then set about creating a custom portal that effectively show-cased Nextlinks’s reseller program and successfully gave partners instant access to critical data such as collateral, training modules, invoices, and contracts. Working closely with Widelity and Nextlink, Concentric recommended numerous strategic and technical improvements that enhanced the user experience and kept the project on track and within budget. Proposing a platform based on the MODx Content Management Framework, Concentric provided a balanced suite of capabilities that included a Web application builder, a development environment, and a content management system. MODx is particularly adaptable to large sites that grow as needs expand with templates that are easy to create. In addition, its interface and management tools made the site easy to maintain and adapt over time. 

Results

“We have very high standards in delivering value and expertise to our clients,” said Michael Lasky, principal at Widelity. “Concentric met all our requirements and allowed us to quickly and affordably create a secure, reliable, and easy-to-manage Web presence for Nextlink in less than two weeks.”

Concentric’s Professional Web Services help SMBs quickly and affordably design, deploy, and manage critical ecommerce sites. The company’s proven experience spans a decade of services that let clients focus on their core competency. By leveraging Concentric’s Professional Web Services, SMBs gain the security and reliability needed to maintain a competitive advantage.

Myspacetoolbox.com Case Study

Clustered Hosting Makes Myspacetoolbox.com's Web Site "Blazing Fast"

Problem

Myspacetoolbox.com (not affiliated with MySpace.com) supports the users of MySpace who want to customize their online portfolios. The top destination for MySpace Utilities, the toolbox allows users to upload photos, videos, music or whatever they'd like to enhance their online presence at MySpace. Myspacetoolbox supports users in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia from its offices in Southern California.   

Challenges 

Provide a fast, reliable, affordable hosting solution to handle a high volume of traffic that was bringing dedicated servers to their knees and crashing the site on a regular basis.

Solution

Myspacetoolbox chose Concentric's Clustered Web Hosting solution in January of 2006, and has never looked back. With Concentric's unique Clustered Hosting technology comprised of fault-tolerant, load-sharing server clusters, the Concentric hosting platform has provided top performance even at the height of peak hours of use. In fact, because of caching, the more usage a site gets, the more efficient Clustered Hosting becomes in serving the site.

Results

"When I was having trouble with my web site, I started looking around on the Internet for another solution. I did a Google search on ‘clustered hosting’ and found Concentric. Switching my site to Concentric’s clustered hosting has made the site ‘blazing fast,’" says the owner and Webmaster of Myspacetoolbox.

"The site grew incredibly fast and even the dedicated servers and enterprise accounts I was on couldn’t handle the high volume of traffic I was getting every day. The site was crashing all of the time and was especially vulnerable during peak hours of use. That’s never been a problem since switching over to the clustered hosting Concentric provides. And the price was right as well," he continued.

Concentric's Clustered Hosting solution ensures that Web servers are available to handle huge spikes in traffic and processing demands from sites such as Myspacetoolbox.com. Accounts are not resident on any single server; they share the computing power of the cluster, so resources are virtually limitless. Protection isn't an issue either since firewall protection and access control are natively integrated into the platform-accounts are isolated from each other, so service and data are safe. And, as Myspacetoolbox.com found, pricing is a fraction of the cost of dedicated solutions.