Launched in 2007, Business Spectator is the brainchild of Alan Kohler and Eric Beecher. Joined by Robert Gottliebsen and Stephen Bartholomeusz, Business Spectator has quickly established itself as a genuine, and independent, alternative for business news and opinion in Australia.
Here at Valegro, we’re pleased to be associated with Business Spectator in several ways. During the launch of Business Spectator, Valegro founder and CEO, Pieter Coetzee, was the head of IT and development, and oversaw the launch and growth of the company, from the very first day right through the second redevelopment and expansion of the website. Under Pieter’s watch Business Spectator grew from zero page impressions at launch to over 6 million Nielsen audited page impressions per month.
Valegro is proud to be providing Business Spectator with high availability systems architecture services today, mainly focusing on the server and infrastructure management of a combination of Open Source Linux (Centos, Ubuntu), Microsoft server and IBM Lotus Domino cluster technologies driving the Business Spectator online publication.
“I’ve always been proud and happy to work with Business Spectator,” says Pieter Coetzee. “No matter what happens in the future, it is a testiment to our ability to work through tough technical system demands and deliver pleasing outcomes for our client.”
Business Spectator has presented Valegro with unique challenges, especially around maintenance and uptime of its very popular online business news publication. The Business Spectator website is constantly updated with new news every few minutes, published around the clock 24/7, every day of the year.
“One of the major experiences and learnings Business Spectator and Valegro has had is working together to ensure continuous uptime and fall back strategies in the unlikely (but surprisingly common!) event of server failure,” says Pieter. “The unfortunate reality of the internet is that at some point in time someone, somewhere is going to attack your servers, and try to disrupt your ability to run your business. As Business Spectator’s business is about being online as much as possible, we’ve taken extra precautions and have several procedures in place so that, if something does go wrong, we’re on top of it quickly, and service to the end user and the internal stakeholders such as the editorial team, aren’t disrupted.”
“I’m pleased to say that we have a better than 99% uptime record with Business Spectator – not bad when you consider they process and publish up to 1,000 news stories every day,” says Pieter, who also mentions that these aren’t just learnings he’s used to improve Business Spectator’s experience, he’s now sharing and implementing those learnings to all his clients for their benefit too.
To see our work with Business Spectator, please visit them here, and if you’re looking to make the leap from startup phase to small or medium sized online business enterprise, please give us a call on 03 9018-7510, or contact us on this form.