Private Proxmox Cluster Hosting for Ballicom’s Growth

About Ballicom

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Coventry, Ballicom Limited is a leading technology retailer and solutions provider to the public sector, SMEs, and large enterprises across the UK. The company’s thriving e‑commerce platform lists more than 100,000 IT products from servers and storage to software licensing and peripherals while its in‑house technical team delivers bespoke infrastructure projects, device roll‑outs, and lifecycle services. Continuous online availability and data integrity are mission‑critical: customers depend on Ballicom’s website for real‑time stock, sharp pricing, and rapid fulfilment, and government frameworks expect uncompromising security. To keep pace with growth and guarantee a seamless user experience, Ballicom sought a robust private‑cloud foundation backed by specialists who could operate and secure it around the clock.

The Challenge

Ballicom’s web storefront, ERP system, and order‑processing pipelines were outgrowing their legacy virtual‑server estate. Page‑load latency during peak promotions risked revenue, and nightly database exports were increasingly difficult to schedule inside maintenance windows.Any solution had to integrate cleanly with Ballicom’s DevOps workflow and remain within the West Midlands for optimal latency to fulfilment partners.

“We needed cloud‑style elasticity but with the compliance and control of on‑prem,” recalls Rohil Dattani, Managing Director. “In addition, GDPR and cyber‑insurance audits demanded demonstrable off‑site backups, multi‑factor perimeter security, and auditable change management.”

You can visit Ballicom at https://www.ballicom.co.uk/

The Solution

UK Servers engineered a Coventry‑based Proxmox cluster for Ballicom, leveraging Ceph distributed storage to present a single, resilient data pool across commodity nodes. Application containers run on SSD‑backed hyper‑converged hosts, allowing Ballicom’s developers to deploy or scale micro‑services in minutes. A pair of redundant Juniper firewalls configured with CARP fail‑over protect east–west and north–south traffic, while an always‑on site‑to‑site VPN encrypts replication to UK Servers’ London data‑centre, where immutable, daily snapshots are retained for 30 days. “

Ballicom wanted true private‑cloud agility without public‑cloud sprawl,” explains David Howes, Technical Director at UK Servers. “By combining Proxmox’s open orchestration with Ceph’s self‑healing storage, we delivered hyperscaler features at predictable cost—plus sub‑2 ms latency inside Coventry.”

“Proactive monitoring watches every container, disk, and link; UK Servers’ NOC escalates anomalies before they affect customers. Patch windows are coordinated via Slack with Ballicom’s developers, and hardware replacements carry a 30‑minute on‑site SLA.”

Customer Feedback

Since migrating, Ballicom’s average page render time has dropped 38 %, and Black‑Friday sessions peaked at four‑times the previous record with zero downtime.

“The performance uplift was immediate, but the real win is peace of mind,” says Jason Edmonds, Lead Web Developer. “I can spin up staging clones in seconds and know every byte is replicated off‑site automatically.”

With a scalable, secure platform in place, Ballicom is already piloting containerised BI workloads and plans to extend its Ceph pool for object storage, confident UK Servers will keep capacity, compliance, and continuity firmly under control.

Liam Fleet, Network Engineer at UK Servers, explains: “Having a presence in Coventry allows us to respond quickly, being hands-on within minutes. However, with the built-in redundancy of the Proxmox and Ceph storage combination, any issues are resolved automatically by the cloud long before we reach the physical machines.”