Web Hosting Provider ServePath Selected by Online SAT Prep Company of Choice PrepMe

HostReview.com
Thursday, June 14, 2007; 02:11 AM

Gone are the days when students could cram for the SAT a few days before taking the college-entrance exam. As a record 1.6 million students take the SAT this year, and as four-year colleges and universities become more competitive and expensive than ever, high SAT scores are increasingly used to determine eligibility for admission and scholarships. Prepping for the SAT has never been more important – or easier – thanks to a new, innovative company called PrepMe, which delivers customized, affordable test preparation online. The 2-year old start-up offers PSAT, SAT, and ACT test preparation and online tutoring to thousands of students per year, spread across five continents, 24x7, and they recently turned to ServePath, a leading dedicated server provider and hosting specialist, for the hosting infrastructure that serves up all of PrepMe’s course material.

But it wasn’t always this way, according to Avichal Garg, co-founder and CTO at PrepMe. “We were a small startup that wanted to make education more efficient and personalized, but we didn’t want to build and manage the infrastructure required to deliver the service ourselves. Initially we chose an inexpensive managed hosting provider and quickly discovered that as our company grew, we needed a vendor that was more reliable and had a solid track record working with companies in similar, fast-paced online environments.”

After all three of the co-founders of PrepMe were named to BusinessWeek’s list of Top 25 Best Entrepreneurs Under 25 in 2006, and the company was featured in publications such as The Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune Small Business Magazine and The Chicago Tribune, PrepMe’s business grew rapidly, and it quickly became apparent that their server infrastructure needed to grow and maintain rock-solid reliability.

PrepMe turned to ServePath because of their 10,000% Guaranteed®, 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) that provides 100 minutes of service credit for every minute of downtime. “We provide PrepMe – and all companies – with highly customized solutions that easily scale to accommodate fast upturn and growth in business volume, especially for companies delivering a service like test prep online,” said John Keagy, president at ServePath. “By taking advantage of ServePath’s advanced infrastructure and technical expertise, PrepMe is able to provide a customized learning experience for each individual student,” concluded Keagy.

“Worrying about our IT infrastructure took time and money away from our core business. We wanted a proven hosting organization, and ServePath was the only company that could guarantee that our test prep and tutorials are available 24/7 for a reasonable cost,” said PrepMe’s Garg.

High Availability for Web 2.0 Companies

PrepMe uses ServePath’s High Availability Server Network solution, a redundant and cost-effective hosting environment that utilizes load balancing techniques to prevent downtime. This means that if a web server experiences a hardware or software problem, it is taken out of the server cluster, and future traffic is not directed to it until it comes back online and is integrated back into the cluster.

These benefits have become de rigueur for always-on Web 2.0 businesses such as PrepMe. “Our business is conducted entirely online with kids from around the world taking our online Flash tutorials, and communicating with their tutors and each other, so downtime is not an option for us. Our web site needs to be running 24/7 which is why we decided on using ServePath for our hosting infrastructure with our servers and load balancers. As we look to expand our offerings to include social networking capabilities, our bandwidth requirements will also increase and it will be imperative that we are entrusting our site to experts like ServePath,” said Garg.

About ServePath

ServePath is a leading dedicated server and managed hosting specialist, providing custom services to businesses that need powerful Internet hosting platforms. Thousands of companies worldwide look to ServePath for its reliability, customization, and speed. Its new 10,000% Guaranteed Service Level Agreement is unique in the web hosting industry, promising specific levels of network performance and 100% uptime with a 100x guarantee. ServePath also provides colocation services through its ColoServe division. The employee-owned company has been in business for six years and operates its own San Francisco data center.

About PrepMe

PrepMe, Inc. is an innovative start-up in the field of online education, test preparation, and high school to college transition services. They created a course that not only teaches students how to outsmart the test, but teaches them all the underlying knowledge along with how to accelerate their reading, comprehend more, memorize better, and study more effectively. The result: an SAT I course that averages a 300 point increase per student, PrepMe became the SAT preparation of choice for all public high school students in the state of Maine starting in 2007.