The British House of Commons and House of Lords is seeking to procure a contract for the provision of strategic web hosting for the Parliamentary website (http://www.parliament.uk),

Parliament fancies itself, and its online channels as "high profile" and increasingly "business critical". In the last 12 months the site has received 16,000,000 visits, from 10,000,000 unique visitors, with daily visitor traffic varying from a ebb of 6,000 visits to a peak of 158,000.

Editor Note "Lets Put this in Perspective"
Social network giant Facebook (doubtless, many see FB as business critical) has the most unique number of visitors in the realm, but its page view numbers – 570 billion – are what really dwarf every other site on the Web, including Yahoo, which Facebook tops by 500 billion page views . Facebook is followed by Yahoo and Microsoft's Live online services in the two and three spots, with 70 billion and 39 billion, respectively. In number of unique visitors, the competition is a bit closer, showing Facebook with 540 million users, Yahoo with 490 million, and Microsoft Live with 370 million.

Back to the tender...
The supplier will be tasked with providing a service which meets expectation levels around availability, support and issue management. The supplier will be expected to demonstrate flexible commercial models which ensure Parliament can get value for money and be proactive in ensuring that Parliament’s online channels are delivered in a resilient, secure and robust way. At present House hosting is provided by a range of internal and external suppliers with varying service levels and provision.

I Googled for the Lords & Ladies present IT budgetary stipend, and realized why the VAT tax needed to be increased to 20% last January. Suffice it to say the European Parliament signed a €12m (£10m) IT service agreement with Accenture recently but this included development and support of a range of applications... so the bid should come in substantially lower... (who am I kidding!)

- The site presently has a load time of 4.6 seconds using Pingdom 
- Google gives parliament.uk a pagerank of... (measure of relative importance of a site on the  web) …. zero
- Network tools show Colt Technology Services is presently hosting the servers

Taking a closer look at the tender, the lords and ladies do appear to be asking the right questions that anyone seeking a new web host should be rightly concerned with:

1.Do you have a trial period or money-back guarantee?

2.How does your customer service and technical support system work?

3.Can I view a sample site that is hosted on the same server that my web site will be on?

4.Known to come under threat from malicious attack.. any suggestions

5.Does it scale easily.

6.Will you waive set up fees or give me some other special incentives to sign up with you today... na they never, but they did have #7

7.Abilities to feature dynamic video and online games.
 
As Parliament is keen to rationalize the provision of hosting to establish a consistent service levels in line with business need as cost effectively as possible while working in partnership with the supplier to take advantage of new opportunities that technology can provide, the Lords and Ladies may wish to consider using an American cloud  hosting supplier like Amazon. In addition to direct cost savings, the indirect economic benefits derived through lower espionage costs to the US will benefit  and stimulate society as a whole.

More official details of the tender can be found here:
https://www.publictenders.net/tender/122113