Xela Limited - History

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History

In March 1999 someone registered xela.co.uk with a view to setting up a small web design business. A temporary homepage was set up, and a small number of potential local customers approached. We picked up our first web customer a month later, with a second the next month. These were both quite simple sites but set us up in the right direction for our future in bespoke development.

Our introduction to hosting came in July 1999 when our first server edison.xela.co.uk was colocated with a local ISP. At that stage we also joined the UK naming organisation, Nominet UK. Our new server ran our web, mail, ftp, dns and several online gaming service, and we started selling hosting services directly and through some resellers.

During November and December 1999, realising we needed more servers, we ordered and installed a Leased Line. This was a 128K service from PSINet, and allowed us to host several more servers - and even provide colocation for a customer's server! At this stage, we focused more closely on providing hosting and put web design on a back burner.

On 22nd February 2000 Xela Limited was incorporated, and issued company number 3931219 by Companies House. We registered for VAT shortly after. During the following months we gained more hosting customers, as well as several more web development customers. For the most part, these projects were small static web sites. We made very light use of CGI scripts, mostly perl to give very basic interactivity to pages.

In October 2000 we moved office and servers to Sevenoaks. From a technical perspective most customers remained unaware; the downtime being kept to the 20 minute drive to actually move the servers from location to location.

At around this time a need for PHP and MySQL skills was becoming apparent, so after an investment in literature and time our first simple PHP applications came to fruition; making more useful web pages that interacted with simple data sources, and updating information in realtime. The leap from static to fully dynamic sites was huge and quite unusual at the time. The possibilities seemed endless and it seemed obvious that before long dynamic sites would become the norm.

A number of small dynamic projects were undertaken including directory systems and data management projects but our first major PHP/MySQL content management project was finished in August 2001.

Since our hosting customer base had grown, during August and September 2001, requiring more bandwidth and more resilience, we moved our network and servers to Redbus Interhouse in London's Docklands. Our available bandwidth increased by around 40 times we were also able to give customers the reassurance of the carrier-class hosting facility. This represented a big step forward for the company but involved migrating hundreds of domains between our old and new IP ranges.

A customer's specialist requirements demanded that we developed a Web Site Builder platform to allow users with little or no knowlege of web development to put together a useful web site in just a few minutes. This was completed in March 2002. The concept later formed part of our work for many customers; both existing and new.

In September 2002 we started developing ERIC - our Editor of Rich Internet Content. This DHTML/Javascipt based tool enabled us to more effectively demonstrate and sell content management solutions, which have formed a major part of our work ever since. The tool made content management even more straightforward and efficient, and allowed customers to more easily delegate site management to less "IT interested" staff.

To support our growing hosting service, in February 2003 we doubled backbone bandwidth to our hosting network. Consultancy and development activities started taking up more of our time.

As a result of the increase in development and consultancy, we moved out of the hosting/colocation aspect of our business at the end of December 2003. To ensure the exit was graceful we vetted suppliers, and migrated customers to Gradwell and Watchfront; both firms of good reputation, and firms we felt could continue the level of service our customers had come to expect. The fluidity of our migrations was such that very few customers experienced more than a few minutes of downtime. With no exceptions customers we consulted or developed for stayed with us for those activities. The business was then able to focus fully on these core competencies without the distraction of hosting support.

Another decent start to a year of development and consultancy in 2004 resulted in us looking for new premises, and in September 2004 we purchased our new offices in Edenbridge. Since our main output is now manhours of time in the form of projects, this move will ultimately allow us to employ and accomodate more people, resulting in greater throughput of work and more potential for future growth. This is still just the beginning.