Founded in 2013,ViGO is a South African Web site building and management tool aimed at making the design and development experience far simpler and intuitive.
Aimed at businesses and business owners alike, ViGO is an instinctive platform that responds to the need of the user.
The unnecessary clutter and complexity typically associated with creating a Web presence has been stripped out and replaced with an interface that allows the user to create beautiful designs simply and swiftly.
ViGO also aims to make web development accessible to the everyday user. High price tags and long-term development cycles are not a feature. Users have the option of subscribing to three monthly subscription models (Personal, Business and Enterprise) ranging from R99 to R299.
Each user is granted access to a custom domain, storage, site hosting and basic web functionality such as blogs and galleries. Customers willing to pay a higher monthly rate are also given access to unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and cutting edge plugins such as e-commerce and analytics.
Challenge
Founding and sustaining and ambitious start-up business is challenging. The cost and time associated with developing an inspiring and attractive new web development platform is considerable.
Although ViGO had the capabilities to create and improve its own internal platform, accessing hosting and bandwidth facilities to support this proved challenging. As the company attracted more users so it had become increasingly difficult to provide a competitive service at a low cost.
In expectation of increased user volumes in the future, ViGO’s executive team began the search for a hosting and bandwidth partner to assist the company in its early stage growth.
Solution
After some investigation ViGO identified Microsoft’s BizSpark programme as an ideal opportunity to access valuable business advice and to become part of an African network of technology start-ups.
Microsoft BizSpark also offers its members access to the Microsoft Azure platform – directly addressing a significant need that ViGO was looking to address.
Microsoft Azure is a dynamic cloud platform that incorporates a number of integrated services including computing, storage, data, networking and app. Websites and web hosting is a popular feature incorporated into its structure, enabling users to deploy new websites or domains in seconds.
Following Microsoft’s acceptance of the company into the BisSpark programme ViGO’s development team swiftly set about migrating the platform to this new architecture.
Benefits
The benefits associated with ViGO’s move to Microsoft Azure have been considerable, adds Carl Wallace – ViGO Chief Executive Officer.
“We’ve been incredibly fortunate to experience exponential growth in our first year as a business. From just a handful of users in the first few months, ViGO has experienced growth rates of over 500%. Although we’ve welcomed this expansion, it has introduced new challenges – particularly in relation to hosting capacity.
To resolve this challenge we recently agreed to partner with Microsoft South Africa as a key contributor to the BizSpark $60k offer. Access to Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform has been central to this agreement – it has equipped us with the capacity to continue offering its services to local businesses at a competitive rate.”
In this way Microsoft Azure has allowed ViGO to organically expand without the concern of costly hosting or storage. A humble start-up has swiftly evolved into a competitive a tremendously exciting player within the global technology market.
Without access to a dynamic cloud platform this would not have been possible.
“As a fast moving web technology start-up. ViGO is a keen user of Open Source technologies. Azure’s support for open source has been really amazing. Presently we are using several open source technologies on Azure such as Apache, PHP, Chango and JQuery.”
