Hosting isn’t one-size-fits-all. At Speedyrails, we create custom managed cloud hosting solutions based on our customers’ individual needs.
Teamer is an online sports team management application based out of London, England. The app was designed to take the hassle out of managing any sports team so you can focus on what’s really important—playing the game!
With such a popular application, it’s important that the behind-the-scenes infrastructure can handle all the users and new developments. That’s where we come in. We chatted with Steve Moulton, CTO and Head of Product at Teamer, to find out a little more about the app and how Speedyrails has helped them build a custom managed cloud hosting solution that suits their needs.
What’s the story behind Teamer?
About ten years ago, I got a phone call from my brother. Frustrated, he told me that the captain of his hockey team was on vacation and that now he had the responsibility of organizing the hockey players for the upcoming game. My brother spent two days on the phone trying to hunt down players! He was surprised there wasn’t anything online that could help him with this.
My brother and I had been sports team organizers in the past and we were both working in tech at that time. In an effort to solve this problem, we expanded our conversation to a software developer and a friend who was in the business development field. Things grew from there. A year later, we got some funding together, the four of us left our jobs, and Teamer was born. We were originally based out of Ireland, and I was in Chicago. Nowadays, I’m still in Chicago and we have a small office in Dublin, but our main office is in London. The UK is our biggest market now. Teamer also has a small team in Australia; we have a good-sized user base there.
What lead you to using Speedyrails to host Teamer?
Teamer used a different hosting service for about six years. They were bought out, standards started to drop, and good people left. Furthermore, they changed their offerings and we weren’t a good fit for any of their new hosting products, so it was time to go.
I did a lot of looking around and a lot of reading. Eventually, I became convinced that you are better off partnering with a smaller organization that truly values your business as opposed to a hosting giant. With every hosting company we used in the past, the same story kept repeating: the bigger the hosting company became, the more their services would deteriorate. Speedyrails was smaller but had a history; they had been around for a number of years, so it was fair to assume they knew what they were doing. My initial dealing with Speedyrails was positive. Communication, which is key to this kind of relationship, was always good. We discussed what a migration plan might look like and it all seemed sound and made sense.
Tell us about your experience with Speedyrails!
It’s been very positive so far!
Migrating servers was a big fear of mine. We went through a messy migration in the past back when we only had one third of our current traffic and users. I was really worried about downtime, configuration issues, and everything else that could go wrong. That being said, the Speedyrails migration plan was sound and it was executed very well. Right away, we could see that the servers were performing better than we had ever seen with other hosting services. Teamer had a very positive run with excellent uptime statistics and stability, and communication with Speedyrails remained very good. When I had an issue, the team got back to me very quickly; tickets were always handled efficiently and effectively.
We continue to work closely together. Our team has learned a lot and we value the input of Speedyrails when implementing changes to try and improve our performance and stability. It’s not always perfect—mistakes are sometimes made—but that’s the nature of technology. The important thing is maintaining positive communication while working through problems and doing what is needed to fix issues. Speedyrails scores very highly on this front!
Why is it so important for Teamer to use a managed hosting service?
Teamer is very product-focused. We spend our finite time and resources trying to make our product better—building features and enhancements for our users. We didn’t want to take on the task of managing our own infrastructure, which would inevitably detract from our ability to stay focused on our product. For a long time, we didn’t have the resources available to hire a system architect. Although we have more resources now, we still believe that managed hosting makes sense for us. It only makes sense if you have the right partner, and we feel like we have that now with Speedyrails.
What’s next for Teamer?
Teamer is currently evolving from a team management system to a full club website service. In time, we will also have an application that services sports leagues. We’re continuously growing and expect to grow more rapidly once our Club and League applications are available. Speedyrails is a key piece in ensuring we can offer a stable and performant application for our users. Teamer will continue to have technical challenges and framework upgrades, but we also know that we have a knowledgable and responsive partner in Speedyrails. Together, we’ll tackle those challenges as they come.
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