CompanyGMC Group is the publishing arm of the Guild of Master Craftsmen which represents over 400 different crafts, trades and professions, promoting and supporting excellence. It is based in Lewes in East Sussex and publishes and distributes over 3000 books and magazines about a diverse range of crafts such as photography, woodworking, gardening and cookery.

Each publication has its own website and under the umbrella of the GMC Group there are also several different book publishing companies with separate websites such as Button Books and Ammonite Press. GMC Group also runs the Find a Craftsman website which provides consumers with a database of accredited members of the Guild.

Case Study: Guild of Master Craftsmen publishing group

The platform

GMC Group uses Hosting UK for its web hosting. It has two dedicated servers which host the range of websites operated by GMC Group plus its main umbrella e-commerce website.

Previously the hosting was split between a number of different providers which proved difficult to manage. In recent times all the hosting has been migrated to Hosting UK for ease of management.

Nigel Morris, web development manager for GMC Group, explains, “We’ve upgraded our hosting and chose to bring it all under Hosting UK’s watchful eye. We have two identical, dedicated, mirrored servers which back each other up. It means that if there is an issue with one, we can easily switch to the other.”

Windows 2003 - End of life

Hosting UK has helped GMC Group migrate from Windows Server 2003 because of Microsoft’s decision to end its life support. “We were running SQL 2005 on Windows 2003 so we have had

“Hosting UK provides us with good, reliable servers with a useful amount of bandwidth so I’m not running out of space.”

to upgrade everything internally to SQL 2012 but make it backward compatible with 2005,” says Nigel. “The servers in Hosting UK’s data centre we use are Dell R-220’s. They run on Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2012 and the two systems can now communicate well.” The team at Hosting UK has developed very specific skills to deal with end of life management to ensure its customers are not using out-of-date platforms. They have completed the migration of more than 2,000 websites from Windows 2003 to Windows 2012 with zero downtime so were confident they could help GMC Group complete their next stage planning without any problems.

Scalable hosting

The large number of websites operated by GMC Group both in the UK and the US means traffic can vary significantly and quickly.

“Hosting UK provides us with good, reliable servers with a useful amount of bandwidth so I’m not running out of space,” explains Nigel. “We have just invested in Umbraco for our CMS system. This means we can scale up from a few hundred users to several million

without issue and the servers we have with Hosting UK can cope with that quite happily as does our main website.”

Phil Parry, Sales and Services Director for Hosting UK, says, “We have a good long-term relationship with GMC Group so we were able to migrate them from Windows 2003 without any fuss and in plenty of time. Many of our customers see us as an extension to their own IT departments so we will naturally advise them when they need to start thinking about upgrades and work with them to move them comfortably to new platforms as we did with GMC.”

For more information about GMC Group visit www.thegmcgroup.com

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