In December 2007 oldfootballshirts.com almost came to a grinding halt. Our traffic was going through the roof and on 30th December we were exceeding our monthly bandwidth limit big time and our old hosting company just could not keep up.

In a frantic Google search for a new hosting company we came across an outfit called cyBelle - now, the appropriatly named, Xmas IT services !

Weary to begin with as I could not believe they could offer us more bandwith than we needed at a great price so I thought I’d give them a call at 9pm on Sunday night on 30th December.  To be honest I did  not expect to get a response at that time but hey! they were there and very helpful and made me feel confident and relaxed about the whole situation.

Within 30 minutes I had signed up for their service and began the painstaking task of transfering the website from our old provider to the new servers. It was at this point I realised just how incredibly fast the new server was. For the technically minded I was compressing and transfering about a gigabyte of files, images and databases via FTP (server-server). The response time was amazing, setting up the databases and file system on the new host was almost like I was in the same building as the web server when in fact I was only on a relatively slow 1Mb ADSL connection with just 128kb upload.

It’s been a year (to quote Al Murray!) and the only downtime we have experienced was planned and due to upgrades. In fact sometimes when I get advised they are doing an upgrade to improve performance I’ve asked “WHY?” - it’s already blisteringly fast!

The reason we need not just a lot of webspace and bandwidth is down to the statistics - up to a quarter of a million hits a month (at time of writing), over 10,000 photos of shirts, each in 3-4 different sizes. The high number of visitors we get and the huge number of dynamically generated images (thumbnails etc.) and database requests would bring other shared web hosting servers to a grinding halt - as we know only too well!

We are now hitting in excess 30GB of traffic a month and Xmas IT Services still keep delivering!

Wherever you are in the world, Xmas IT services can host your website on really fast servers with all the bandwidth and webspace you could need and even dedicated, managed, servers for the real serious stuff.

Am I affiliated with them?

Well, yes in fact! They’ve got an affiliate referral program so I guess that makes me affiliated with them - but this is not just blatant selling blurb to make a quick buck, it’s an honest appraisal of a web hosting company who got us out of a sticky mess and really really never cease to impress me with the speed of their servers considering the complexity of oldfootballshirts.com.

So, if anyone clicks the Xmas IT services links/banners on oldfootballshirts.com and subsequently signs up with them we get a little commision which goes straight back into paying for our own hosting, web development and sponsorship costs.