The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (www.ukho.gov.uk), an agency of the Ministry of Defence, announced that it is searching for a web hosting provider. Hosting providers can submit bids for the 36-month contract until June 18, 2004. According to the agency, the contract is worth £100,000.
The agency is looking for a complete web hosting solution with detailed contract deliverables. According to the agency, the winning bid should include a firewall, load balancing and data mirroring. In addition, bidders should also be able to monitor service performance 24/7, monitor website data integrity and provide a support helpdesk. The winning bidder should also be approved by the Ministry of Defence.
The website of the agency currently contains five sub-sites, over 400 pages and 15GB of data. The site also includes the Admiralty Online Catalogue, a searchable database of UKHO’s products and EasyTide, a tide prediction application. The websites of the agency were having 120,000 unique visitors by March 2004, which is a threefold increase over the previous year. The agency uses two different hosting providers at present.
