York-based, managed website hosting company, HA, has recorded its best financial year since it was first established in 2008.
The company has seen substantial growth over the last 12 months, including a 14% increase in turnover, as more and more businesses move online to ensure their survival in the current climate.
The Coronavirus pandemic has significantly impacted how we shop, eat and communicate; as online demand intensifies, businesses need to keep up, increasing the requirement for HA’s professional web hosting expertise.
The company, which was set up in 2008 by founder and CTO, Nick Bascombe-Fox, specialises in fully managed hosting, providing 24/7 support to ensure its managed customer websites and digital applications are running efficiently, securely and most importantly are never offline.
One of the largest areas of growth for HA over the last year has been e-commerce sites. Retail has been one of the hardest hit sectors during the pandemic and, as a result, many small businesses have found it essential to move their offering online in order to withstand the restrictions.
CTO, Nick Bascombe-Fox said: “The last year has been one of the busiest but most interesting years I’ve seen since we set up 13 years ago. The pandemic has meant we’ve seen a real shift in how people are behaving online. As a small business, to survive in the current climate you have to have an online presence. Not only do you need a website, but it also needs to run quickly and efficiently, be secure and always on. With increasing online competition, even if your website is down for just a few hours it can have significant consequences for your business.
“At HA, we provide a fully managed hosting service where our clients only speak to support engineers, which means, rather than passing the technical responsibility to our clients, our dedicated team take on that role to ensure that online businesses are kept up and running.”
To support the delivery of the increased workload, HA, has recently recruited new members of staff who have all joined the team in the last three months, almost doubling their head count.
The company has also recently re-branded, bringing a fresh, modern new look to the business, and incorporating a design which reflects how the business has changed and expanded over the years, as well as its brand values.
Nick added: “We’ve come such a long way over the last 13 years but bringing in new staff and updating our branding has made a real difference. It’s important for me that our brand reflects who we are and what we’ve achieved over the last few years, as well as what we stand for.”
