A company which works with some of the biggest names in online financial products says it has seen a big cut in costs by swapping to a new web hosting service.

Penrith-based theidol.com develops applications and online tools for insurance comparison and consumer finance websites including GoCompare, confused.com and Comparethemarket. It has recently upgraded its hosting infrastructure to Amazon Web Services.

As well as developing its famous online shopping platform, Amazon has also created a hosting platform with data centres all over the world.

“Prior to using AWS we used a host firm in Manchester with data centres and effectively rented servers off them that they put in a rack in their data centre,” said managing director Paul Tyson.

“We had a specified resource and if we want to add to it it takes time and they have to put more things in the data centre.

"With AWS they have these data centres all over the world – the main ones we are using are in London and Dublin.

"They are all interlinked and there will be multiple data centres in each city.

“It’s what people refer to as cloud hosting, so we don’t have a physical machine that is dedicated to us, we just rent the compute power, so if I want to spin up extra resource because we know the website is going to be busier we can do that with five minutes’ notice.

"The whole thing is designed to scale to the amount of website traffic. As the website traffic increases it automatically increases the amount of resource in the data centre and comes down again when it quietens down.”

Rather than being charged a flat rate, the company is billed depending on how much use it makes of the service – which is in turn linked to the size of its web traffic.

“The beauty of it is that in the middle of the night when there is very little website traffic we pay very little,” said Paul.

He said since switching to AWS the monthly cost of web hosting had come down by about 25 per cent.

“It was about a two-year project in all,” he said.

“The big piece of work was taking our old infrastructure and migrating it across with as little downtime as possible.

"We are a 24/7 business and we host journeys for Comparethemarket, GoCompare and Confused, and they demand 99.95 per cent of uptime.

"We had to test the migration several times and ensure we could move all the data and systems across with as little downtime as possible.”