SafariNow is an online travel agency providing accommodation-booking services throughout Southern Africa. With over 22 000 establishments listed on their website and more than half a million monthly visitors, it is no wonder that they need a fast, reliable Internet connection to keep up with the demand.

Over the past decade the business has grown significantly and they now employ 50 staff members who need to be connected all the time. This put a strain on their previous network and Internet connection. Another challenge facing the growing online business was that their data transfer simply wasn’t fast enough for backups. It was because of these factors that they decided to move to RSAWEB’s City Fibre solution with a 100Mbps line speed.

“In the last three to five years the need for super-fast Internet connectivity has grown dramatically, we’ve had to keep increasing capacity and line speed to cope,” says Matthew Evans, CTO at SafariNow.

The migration process from their previous provider to RSAWEB’ City Fibre was seamless thanks to the dedicated support team at RSAWEB. “We moved everything including our hosting and connectivity, so we had to do a lot of forward planning. RSAWEB were very helpful and had dedicated support throughout the process,” comments Matthew.

Since the move to RSAWEB City Fibre SafariNow are able to transfer large volumes of data between the data centre and their office with ease.  Matthew says another big change the business has seen since connecting with fibre is that; “fast, reliable connectivity improves productivity and enables use cases that were impossible before.”

So how has the way they use the Internet changed since implementing fibre? Matthew explains that SafariNow uses their stable, blazing-fast Internet connection; “for Internet breakout and for backhaul connectivity to the RSAWEB data centre. We have used it for log shipping, and backups.”

Being able to run log shipping to their offices as well as the additional disaster recovery option have both proved to be beneficial to the business. Matthew goes on to say that without the fibre connectivity, “we wouldn’t be able to run SQL Server reporting services in our office.”

Everyone working at SafariNow has benefitted greatly from the improved Internet connection, and it has saved them a significant amount of time. Their IT support team found the connection easy to set up and manage and have yet to have an issue with line saturation.

When asked about how important he thinks a fibre connection will be to the business in the years to come Matthew notes; “In addition to our apps hosted in RSAWEB, there are a number of cloud services which are critical to our business. Fast fibre is going to be critical. We are hoping to upgrade to a 200Mbps service in the future.” Matthew goes on to say that, “I think most companies would benefit from the speed and reliability of fibre, even if it’s not 100Mbps.”