The challenge
Peer 1 know hosting inside and out and host enormous web properties such as Wordpress.com. Peer 1 wanted a new experience for managing hosting where customers could serve themselves through an easy to use centralised control panel with comprehensive back-end automation to ensure rapid deployment.
As a Peer 1 customer, Full Fat Things understood the wide range of skills needed from user experience and design to integrating with a vast number of systems and processes, and selling hosting on line, that building a self service portal for customers required.
The shopping cart alone has vast complexity built in because of the wide range of product configuration that hosting options offer.
Our approach
As hosting customers we knew the pain points around managing hosting and we knew that hosting companies typically use disparate systems to provide their service to customers. We worked with Peer 1 to define a single self service product that could sell, upgrade, manage and provision customer hosting solutions.
This included:
- Working with Peer 1 and other partners to define the user experience to allow customers to manage all their Peer 1 products and services in one place
- Abstracting the many systems such as ticketing, provisioning, DNS, finance and monitoring that translate the overall Peer 1 service into one comprehensive platform
- Building a self service portal that uses Peer 1’s internal systems to deliver the hosting service to customers old and new
- Designing the architecture for the portal product to run within Peer 1’s infrastructure
- Supporting the rapid and flexible deployment process within monitored environments
- Mixing commerce with support and management to provide a complete customer service experience
- Drupal powering the portal with its natural fit for the mix of content and framework
- EmberJS powering the cart to create a multi-page solution builder capable of building complex hosting environments with live pricing. We believe this is the most complete live pricing hosting app on the market today. Try it https://ondemand.peer1.com/cloud
The client's view
Bloody brilliant! – Dominic Monkhouse - Peer 1
Great work and looking forward to many more fantastic achievements together!!– Tim Varma - Peer 1
Lessons Learnt
We learnt how deeply we need to put ourselves into the shoes of the customers of our customers to help build self service products. We also learned how fabulously knowledgeable people are who buy hosting and the complexity they can handle in specifying their hosting solution. Building a product for technical experts requires incredible levels of attention to detail.
