Building A Best-In-Market Hosted SaaS Solution with Nomad
Introduction
Nomad is a company that builds and hosts B2B E-commerce websites for approximately 300 customers. Prior to TierPoint, they were hosting in a colocated server environment with owned hardware and had several full-time IT employees on staff to service their VMware environment and physical hardware. Nomad was not only developing software and implementing storefronts, but they were also fully engaged in all the distracting aspects of hosting a large IIS, MS SQL Server, and VMware cluster. Early on with Nomad, it was manageable to be fully accountable for their infrastructure. But as they continued to grow in 2016-2019, picking up more customers and building steam, they noticed an increasingly high amount of time was spent trying to manage and resolve growing pain with their self-managed hosting environment.
Challenges
Prior to its growth surge, Nomad was able to deliver a strong hosting performance, but as it grew, Nomad realized it needed a more elastic hosting configuration. In their industry, having any significant dip in hosting performance can be disastrous, especially for B2B companies where the majority of their revenue can come in on during regular business hours
Nomad quickly realized that without a more reliable host and a strong disaster recovery solution, their users might suffer an unplanned outage. In their search, they started to evaluate what other industry-leading solutions were using for hosting solutions. What ultimately drew Nomad to TierPoint was the prospect of expert management of their hosting infrastructure and the ability to offer Nomad users a diversified hosting solution, instead of only having a public cloud like AWS or Azure as an option.
Solutions
When they started with TierPoint, Nomad was impressed by the onboarding process, including being able to share their current state of work and desired roadmap. They were able to migrate into a greenfield environment that is managed by TierPoint, relieving them from having to retain a large IT team that would only be focused on hosting. Nomad was given the peace of mind that server updates would happen securely, and database administration (DBA) services would be autonomous, only alerting when action needed to be taken.
“It’s honestly been a huge uplift for our team’s agility, instead of having to focus on hosting as being our tip-top, front-of-mind everyday priority, it’s now something we know is being managed by a trusted partner like Tierpoint. And because we know it’s taken care of, we can focus on our platform and growing our business.” –Michael Bates, VP of Operations at Nomad
TierPoint has served as a “force multiplier” for Nomad, operating as a virtual department. Instead of managing five to seven different vendors’ software and several full-time internal employees, Nomad simply needs to call TierPoint if they need something like additional storage, memory, or backup services.
Since Nomad moved to TierPoint, they haven’t had an unplanned outage and are now proudly marketing their new data centers that provide over six-nines for uptime.
In the event of natural disasters or hardware issues, Nomad sees TierPoint’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), powered by Zerto, as an invaluable assurance aspect of their value proposition to end users. They were impressed with the level of replication TierPoint offered and the scalability of the service. Now, Nomad has an environment that is fully replicated to a mirrored data center and has confidence it will be there ready to turn on when they need it.
“TierPoint gives us reliability and redundancy, and they’ve really taken our infrastructure to the true enterprise size Nomad has grown to. We have a stable, extendable foundation to continue to grow Nomad.” - Michael Bates, VP of Operations at Nomad.
Results
If they had to describe their environment prior to coming to TierPoint, Nomad would describe it as “limited.” After making the switch, they’d now use words like “dependable,” “secure,” “trusted,” and “certain.”
As an after-effect of the stability, Nomad has been empowered with additional focus. TierPoint’s services have moved hosting from a problem to a service and given Nomad the ability to streamline and think about how their business can be more efficient. They compare their time pre-TierPoint to manufacturers who use their own trucks because they feel that working with a carrier like FedEx or UPS will be more difficult. With a trusted partner providing these services, Nomad has been able to stop using their own “trucks” and instead rely on a “shipping carrier,” relying on TierPoint to handle the “delivery.”
In addition to the five- and six-nines uptime, they’ve also achieved performance gains, hitting a record 300% gain on applications, as well as seeing Page Speed load and SQL performance improvements.
Whenever Nomad increases their customer load significantly in the future, they’re no longer worried about handling hosting. With a path to grow, they know that they can call on TierPoint to quickly scale up a solution that works for them.
At A Glance
Industry
B2B Commerce
Technology
Multitenant Cloud, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) powered by Zerto, Backup, OS management
Challenge
Rapid growth was straining Nomad’s existing infrastructure and desiring an Enterprise level hosting partner, Nomad had to act fast. They wanted to work with a partner that would offer and manage a diversified hosting solution for Nomad’s evolving platform.
Solution
Nomad was migrated into a greenfield environment created by TierPoint, allowing them to enjoy secure and autonomous management without needing to manage a huge, hosting-focused, internal IT team. TierPoint fills the role of a trusted hosting and hardware team for Nomad. Nomad leverages Disaster Recovery solutions to ensure the reliability that TierPoint manages and maintains.
Results
With the services provided by TierPoint, Nomad has been able to boast six-nines uptime (99.9999%) and enjoy a dependable, industry-leading, and secure environment. Their time has been freed up to focus on business growth, and they’ve achieved performance gains on applications, page speed, and their SQL databases.
Website
https://www.nomad.site/
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Nomad turned to TierPoint to help them reliably host key infrastructure and secure that infrastructure with Disaster Recovery solutions.