Phone: (516) 536-4531
 
 
David Johnson  


 

Hosting Initiative

The initial hosting environment at 1800Flowers.com was outsourced to an independent web development company. 1800Flowers.com was spending over $200,000 a month in development and hosting costs. We had very little control over the running of the website with exception of control over the content. The reliability of the site was in jeopardy with frequent unexplained outages. Although we had our own development staff for backend systems like order entry and order flow processing all details of the web environment was hands off. Additional there were large swings in the amount billed each month for services as we were billed for every change, update, maintenance task, and outage recovery.
One of my first tasks as Vice President of Operations was to work with the 3rd party company to first improve the reliability of the site. Once the site was stable I then developed a migration plan for moving the entire operation in house. With the existing development staff and infrastructure support environment we eliminated a significant amount of duplication of effort. Within 6 months the entire operation had been moved in house at a substantial saving. Our monthly billing went from a variable $100K-$300K a month to under $100K fixed cost each month. This allowed for tighter budgeting controls and completely eliminated budget overruns.
The next phase of this project was the planning and implementation of a multi site hosted environment. Utilizing space in our remote facilities I was able to build this operation up to a very stable three site hosting environment. Utilizing 2 independent co-hosting companies (AT&T and Exodus) as well as our own facilities I was able to lead the operation team to build a state of the art hosting environment. With three locations (New York, Dallas, Virginia) operating independently it was possible to implement an infrastructure that could handle nearly 30,000 orders and hour during our peak holidays.

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