Founded in 2004, Dakota Hotels is a chain of boutique hotels with 5 venues in England and Scotland.
A luxury brand, Dakota have a global online domain with satellite websites for each of its venues, and each website contains a high-end booking system to provide luxury service from the first impression.
With the opening of the new hotel in Manchester, Dakota wished to promote the opening by adding a new sub-domain and a page for Manchester to the existing website structure. Unfortunately, their previous provider were realigning their business and were therefore unable to support Dakota in the hosting of their new website. Thanks to Cloudsoft, they were able to quickly migrate to AWS and get their new site ready for bookings in no time.
Dakota Hotels’ Problem
Ahead of their new hotel opening, Dakota needed to create a satellite website on a new sub-domain for their Manchester venue to enable customers to stay informed and make early bookings. However, as their previous provider was unable to provide them with the support they needed, Dakota realised that this could have a strong, negative impact on their bookings, and therefore their business and revenue.
As a result, Dakota quickly identified an urgent need for a new provider to help them through their migration to AWS and the evolution of their website.
In 48 hours Scott and Cloudsoft discussed Dakota’s requirements and identified a strategy to support their growth.
Why AWS and Cloudsoft?
Scott Shepherd, Facilities and System Director at Dakota Hotels, was in charge of this project. His first instinct was to approach AWS to ask how to easily migrate from their current provider to AWS. Due to Cloudsoft being an AWS Advanced Partner and Cloud experts in migrating, running and evolving customer’s environments, AWS recommended that Scott connect with Cloudsoft to solve their problem.
In 48 hours Scott and Cloudsoft discussed Dakota’s requirements and identified a strategy to support their growth. Scott specifically asked for Cloudsoft to carry out and support the group’s migration to AWS and be a local resource to support him in the future.
Cloudsoft’s Solution
Cloudsoft’s team of experienced engineers set up a new environment using AWS and migrated Dakota’s content – both from WordPress and the group’s databases – to this new environment. The Cloudsoft Engineering team overcame all the challenges and went above-and-beyond to migrate the properties to the latest technologies.
Thanks to the expertise of Cloudsoft’s engineers, Dakota avoided suffering a prolonged blackout of their new webpage which would have had a negative effect on the build up to Manchester and an impact on revenue. Instead, with AWS’ suggestion, they were able to immediately find a solution to their problem, and, at the same time, enhance their environment. Indeed, Dakota are now resilient and performant on the world’s leading cloud.
Results
On top of training Scott on the new hosting platform, Cloudsoft are providing a managed service to monitor the environment and provide support as and when required. This means that Dakota are now ready for their big 2019 opening and can start taking bookings, whilst also having confidence their environment is secure, resilient and scalable.
Dakota Hotels’ Feedback
About the company’s experience with Cloudsoft, Scott Shepherd said:
The Cloudsoft Team handled all of the transition process including liaising with our previous supplier to ensure all settings and files were successfully ported across. When there were slight issues to resolve the team responded promptly, even out of hours, minimising downtime and making the whole process smooth and efficient.