Serving the Union
Serving the Union
WebCentral kicks rivals into touch with ARU web deal. By Stuart Finlayson.
Millions of rugby union fans will be relying on Australian web hosting company WebCentral this year after it secured a deal with the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) to design and implement a high powered hosting solution for its core website (www.rugby.com.au) and its dedicated host union Rugby World Cup 2003 site (www.rugby2003.com.au).
WebCentral kicks rivals into touch with ARU web deal. By Stuart FinlaysonMillions of rugby union fans will be relying on Australian web hosting company WebCentral this year after it secured a deal with the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) to design and implement a high powered hosting solution for its core website (www.rugby.com.au) and its dedicated host union Rugby World Cup 2003 site (www.rugby2003.com.au).
Both websites have already begun experiencing extreme volumes of traffic, with more than 30 million page impressions logged in a recent three day period, despite the tournament not officially beginning until 10 October, 2003.
Lloyd Ernst, CEO of WebCentral, says the company relished the challenge of hosting what will be such an important source of information to so many fans worldwide. "During the Rugby World Cup 2003, the ARU's sites are expected to be among the busiest in Australia. We are excited to be working with the ARU to deliver a top quality hosting service which will provide a more responsive and reliable web experience to the legion of rugby fans that are already showing their interest in the World Cup."
Greg West, Online Services Manager for the ARU, stressed the need for the site to be up at all times, and the consequences for the ARU should the site experience downtime were factors in enlisting the services of WebCentral: "The web will be a primary source of communication for the World Cup. All of our advertising and other promotions will direct people back to the ARU's websites. We need high capacity and we can't afford to be down for one minute, let alone five minutes. If our sites were to go down it would have enormous implications for ticket sales as well as our corporate image.
"The Rugby World Cup is the biggest international sporting event in the world this year. It expands our audience enormously - this is very much an international event and the reliability of our websites will be even more critical than usual. We will be supplying and updating information 24 hours a day, seven days a week to an audience which spans both hemispheres and, effectively, never sleeps."
West added: "WebCentral had been hosting our rugby community site www.rugbynet.com.au for a few years and we had used other providers for other projects. When the time came to plan our hosting for the World Cup we did our research and wanted to partner with a provider who would be proactive, understand our goals and provide guarantees on delivery of the services."
That is not to say that the anticipated enormous volume of visitors to the websites - particularly immediately prior to and during the World Cup - did not throw up a few challenges, but Ernst says that WebCentral has a number of procedures that are put in place prior to implementation to ensure there are no nasty surprises further down the track: "One of the services WebCentral provides is stress testing, where we have clusters of servers that simulate user load. It's part of the service that we provide our customers. There is a bit of planning involved in it, but the stress test is a standard function we perform for a lot of our major customers."
"We also have two data centres and we are able to replicate data between them. This means that we have a strategy in place whereby if there is some catastrophic problem, we are able to serve the data from the second data centre, so it was important to ensure that was in place.
"Additionally, we have a service whereby we can scale and add as many servers as [the customer] likes within 24 hours."
West says the ARU is already noticing a marked improvement in the way WebCentral host its sites compared to the previous hosts: "Since moving our sites, WebCentral has been very proactive in keeping us informed, especially on occasions when issues arise. With our previous host, we often had to contact them to tell them there was a problem."For the duration of the World Cup itself, the ARU's web hosting solution will be further supported by a WebCentral disaster recovery plan to ensure the robustness of the system at its most crucial time.