Foxtons selects Six Degrees Group cloud infrastructure to underpin website operations

Estate agent website is becoming increasingly important in the competative housing and rental market

Foxtons estate agents has deployed Six Degrees Group's (6DG) scalable private cloud to underpin operations across its virtual services and 51 offices in the London and Surrey area.

The deployment follows Bestival music festival in also opting to use Six Degrees Group to underpin its website infrastructure.

For Foxtons and its clients, the website is often the first point of engagement and a number of the services it offers - including the online portal for landlords and tenants to sign documents electronically, virtual tours and location maps - are supported entirely through the internet.

However, with the internet becoming an increasingly important tool in the process of home buying and renting, Foxtons became aware that it needed to invest in new technology to maintain its position in a competitive property market.

Foxtons therefore selected 6DG to design and provide a cloud-based managed hosting environment that would be able to support its current and future operations.

The result was a scalable web-hosting platform with a fully managed backup and disaster recovery system that is able to scale up support to cope with peaks in demand.

"With the constant change and development in the property market it's important for us to keep ahead of the curve. Having an innovative, interactive website is an important part of what sets Foxtons apart from the rest of the market," said Leo Lapworth, web manager at Foxtons.

"For our sellers, landlords, tenants and buyers operating in a hectic market it's important to be able to manage and find the right properties, as well as the ability to arrange secure payments online. The team at 6DG understands how important the website is to our business," he said.

"They have helped us to create a unique hosting platform that can support the website as Foxtons continues to meet the changing needs of the London property market," Lapworth added.

The 6DG deal enables the Foxtons website to benefit from a two-site primary and secondary hosting platform, allowing the site to function with zero downtime, enabling Foxtons IT staff are able to concentrate their efforts on improving services in other ways.

Computing's latest research examined attitudes to cloud computing, demonstrating how as the barriers between public and private cloud are broken down, the hybrid model is becoming increasingly practicable.