Dealing with web traffic spikes

‘The team behind ‘It’s Our World’ is using a Rackspace public cloud to power its website – the aim of which is to become the UK’s largest online collection of artworks celebrating the environment. Anyone aged 4 – 19 years can get involved by creating an artwork to celebrate where they live and uploading it onto the ‘It’s Our World’ Online Gallery.

Overthrow Digital, a digital creative agency that works with the ‘It’s Our World’ team to handle all technical aspects of the public facing website and the content management system, was responsible for selecting Rackspace. The agency had three top requirements that it needed a cloud provider to deliver which were; scalability, intensive support and a clear commitment to the environment – the central theme of ‘It’s Our World’. The initiative saw the eco-friendly values of Rackspace as a key factor in the decision to begin the relationship.

Overthrow Digital opted for Rackspace after facing challenges with its previous hosting provider. The main issues involved receiving adequate support to smoothly set up the solution and having the technical expertise on hand to fix problems. After these negative experiences, the agency decided that the customer service focus of Rackspace was what it needed to effectively deliver a public cloud that provides a fast, reliable experience for website visitors.

Joshua Blavins, Project Manager, Overthrow Digital says: “When working with our previous hosting provider, a high percentage of my time was spent maintaining the website infrastructure. This made it difficult to focus on my more strategic responsibilities which deliver more value to the project. Now that the Rackspace managed cloud service is in place, it’s no longer a worry. We particularly saw a benefit of this when setting up the solution as a Rackspace team of Solutions Architects developed a bespoke, scalable solution very quickly which was just what we needed”.

Jeff Cotten, MD Rackspace International comments: “Rackspace has long been associated with helping charities power their online presence. ‘It’s Our World’ doesn’t have a group of in-house specialists available to maintain the IT infrastructure, so using our team of experts has allowed it to focus on promoting the great artwork these young people are creating rather than on managing servers.

“It’s great to hear that the team behind this initiative wanted to work with us due to our eco-friendly values. I’m proud of the various green initiatives that we are committed to, including running our UK office and data centre sites on 100% certified renewable energy. An increasing number of our customers really appreciate our strong green credentials.”

As the deadline for the school driven project approaches, a large spike of website traffic is expected with teachers and pupils submitting thousands of images. This will happen within a short timeframe, so the charity needs an effective website infrastructure backed up with top quality support to help them deal with the demand.
To achieve the desired levels of scalability, the charity is using a number of helpful tools which are included as part of the solution such as Load Balancers, Cloud Databases and Cloud Files. This will help the website deal with the several hundred thousand visitors a week expected in the lead up to the deadline, many of which will be uploading images of up to 10mb in size. To meet this demand, Rackspace has gone above standard offerings to get the site up and running while offering its services free of charge.

‘It’s Our World’ has been developed in support of The Campaign for Drawing with the active involvement of over 20 environmental, arts and educational partners. It was created to celebrate World Environment Day on 5th June, the United Nations’ flagship day that seeks to empower people from everywhere to do something positive for the environment.