How Forest Holidays migrated its hosted website to a managed service

Migrating to another service provider

Danson joined Forest Holidays a few months after the company began the project to switch hosting service providers. Describing the migration process, he says that all the systems were built and configured by Node4.

Once the website was rebuilt, the back-end SQL Server database was then transferred over to Node4. Finally, domain name server (DNS) was updated to point to the IP address of the new web server. Danson says the whole process went without any issues, adding that there was “less than an hour of downtime”.

Danson puts the success of the switch down to the planning. “We spent plenty of time on testing. Node4 gave us access to the test scripts well in advance of the system being ready,” he says. This meant it was possible to check what was being tested, and more importantly, what tests were being missed by the scripts.

Comprehensive documentation was another factor that helped Danson get up to speed on the project, given that he joined a few months after it started. “We had comprehensive documentation of what we were putting in place. I just needed to get up to speed. If I asked why we were not doing it a different way, there was always someone there who was able to explain,” he says.

Thanks to the extensive project documentation, the migration was completed in under three months, says Danson. “I joined at the end of August 2016, and we migrated by the end of October 2016, which is quite quick. We delayed the switch-over by a week, because it landed during the half-term holidays, which is a busy time for us,” he adds.

Forest Holidays used BaseCamp as a project coordination tool. Danson says the team got Node4 on the phone every couple of weeks for five to 10-minute calls to check on the status of the project. As the deadline approached, these calls became weekly.

Planning ahead

Node4 has been running Forest Holidays’ website for almost two years. Discussing how the site coped with the August 2018 bank holiday weekend, Danson says the website was able to support the level of interest the company received during the peak holiday season.

“The business has 10 sites and 560 cabins. August 20 was our best weekend, and we ran 100% occupancy across all sites,” he adds.

Now that the website is hosted at Node4, Danson says he is confident the website and equipment can scale as the business grows, adding that he will be looking at moving other applications to Node 4 in the future.

“We have typical IT comms at our HQ, so we are looking at whether to move some of that to Node4 to remove as much IT equipment as possible from the head office,” says Danson.