www.flirtomatic.com is a major online social networking service accessible via the Internet and mobiles phones.
Members can chat with other users, flirt, send rapid messages with graphics and photos, and buy small virtual presents for each other.
The service has 3.5 million registered users. 55% of Flirtomatic users are between 18 and 25 years and the average user visits Flirtomatic eight times a day. Flirtomatic is available to mobile users in the UK, Germany, Australia, Spain, Italy and the United States.
Operated by London-based Handmade Mobile Entertainment Ltd, the company has won major awards for Flirtomatic, including a prestigious MEFFY (Mobile Entertainment Awards) for the best online community. They also topped the Media Technology 100 as the hottest private media company in Europe.
Hailed as "a real UK mobile 2.0 pioneer" by the influential technology blog, techcrunch.com, the throughput demands of running a real-time interactive service requires serious Internet infrastructure to maintain an excellent user experience.
With their previous datacentre provider running out of rack-space and power for additional servers, Flirtomatic took the opportunity to upgrade their hosting supplier. James Stockton, Finance Director said, "We were determined to find a solution that could handle future scalability in terms of datacentre space, power and connectivity. It was important we find providers that were capable of offering a reliable and resilient service with multiple top tier internet network connections in London. After a rigorous selection process we selected the combination of Interxion for datacentre space and Xtraordinary Hosting for scalable bandwidth in London. Both providers have excellent reputations for in-built resilience and reliability."
Xtraordinary Hosting provides Flirtomatic with a highly reliable multi-homed Internet service. The high capacity Internet bandwidth for Flirtomatic's hosting facility is managed by Xtraordinary's London Network Operations Centre, on-site overlooking the Interxion datacentre.
Xtraordinary provides direct diverse connections handled between five tier-1 internet networks. Extensive dual gigabit peering on LINX (London Internet Exchange) provides very high service resilience with auto failover for increased resilience. A fully redundant carrier grade all-Cisco network delivers low network latency and reliability of packet throughput essential for this kind of online service.
