Girlsense.com: Izik Shoshan

"We consider UPTIME more of a partner than a service provider. They give us the edge we need in the highly competitive ecommerce market."

Itzik Shoshan, Girlsense.com

As the Chief Technical Officer at the popular girls' website, Girlsense.com, Izik's IT needs are more complicated than that of the average business owner. As an open source community, Girlsense has developed a unique system for creating and selling clothing based on the specific demands of their clientele. Instead of trying to create demand for their merchandise, Girlsense has utilized the latest in social networking techniques to create their merchandise based on the demands of their community. As an innovative web-based property, high performing IT solutions are paramount to Girlsense's success.

"UPTIME upgrades, maintains and troubleshoots the sophisticated systems that keep the site up and running-almost all of it Linux-based and with remote access," says Izik. "By relying on UPTIME's services, it frees us up to tackle the more pressing technical needs of the site and its operation."

Before UPTIME

Relying on a combination of in-house and outsourced IT consultants left girlsense.com with a host of problems all stemming from uncoordinated IT installation, upgrading and maintenance. A problem made worse by the fact that a former in-house IT manager did such an excellent job setting up the original system. When this employee went on to work for Microsoft, the void he left created significant problems for Girlsense, and UPTIME did its best to fill the big shoes left by the previous IT manager.

With UPTIME
Running Izik's full website requires a firewall, load balancer, web server, network attached server and databases-and almost all of it Linux-based and with remote access. That's why Izik S. turns to UPTIME to install new hardware, fix storage problems, configure access, as well as provide regular maintenance, back-ups, upgrades and field urgent problems. By relying on one IT consultant, all systems are coordinated to ensure optimal performance.

But Don't Take It From Us
"Given how sophisticated our systems are we couldn't just rely on any IT consultant. Every segment of the system needs to run seamlessly or the site goes down," says Izik. "And when your business is on the line like that, it just doesn't make sense to take unnecessary risks with unproven service providers."