Originally published by Computer Weekly
Hyve Managed Hosting has lifted the lid on the work it is doing to ensure the National Television Awards (NTAs) website has the capacity to cope with an influx of visitors to its website during the voting periods for this year’s show.
This is the fourth year in a row the Brighton-based cloud services provider has been called upon by the NTAs to provide the hosting infrastructure needed to stand-up its online voting system.
The awards are voted for entirely by the public, who are invited to participate through phone or online voting, with the latter proving to be the most popular method of audience participation.
“Although voting by phone is possible, a huge number of votes are cast online during the two stages leading up to the ceremony, so ensuring both reliability and scalability of the NTA’s website during these periods is critical,” said Hyve, in a statement.
To handle the anticipated increase in traffic to its website during the voting period Hyve has devised a bespoke, load-balanced cloud platform for the NTA’s broadcast partner, Indigo Television, ahead of the ceremony on 5 September 2023.
The server resources available to support the website during the voting period are 24 times higher than their usual levels, with Hyve dialing back these resources once the voting period is over to keep a lid on the costs and to ensure no resources are wasted.
“Hyve hosts two virtual servers for the NTAs on its managed enterprise cloud platform and has been upgrading cloud resources for the website over the summer as and when needed, to ensure everyone who wants to vote can, and that it remains a fair and consistent process,” the Hyve statement added.
“Hyve’s support team is also on hand to continuously monitor the servers even after resources have been increased to their new levels.”
As part of this work, the Hyve team has set threshold alerts for its servers so that if traffic to the NTA website hits “unprecedented levels”, it will receive an alert to ramp up the server resources available to it.
“The ability to scale cloud resources dynamically on virtual servers also helps streamline the voting period for Indigo Television as nothing new needs to be introduced beyond their existing hardware, meaning they don’t need new logins or IPs when voting commences,” Hyve added.
Kim Turberville, executive producer at the NTAs, set out why the work Hyve is doing in support of this year’s NTAs is so important.
“It’s essential that everyone who wants to vote is able to, so it’s all hands on deck in the lead up to the ceremony. Having Hyve available 24/7 as an extension of our team gives us peace of mind that one of the most important facets of the whole process is going to run without a hitch, and we stick with them year in year out because they deliver a cloud solution that works for us during voting without having to pay for resources we don’t need the rest of the year.”
Jake Madders, director and co-founder of Hyve Managed Hosting, added: “Creating cloud solutions that are tailored to the individual requirements of organisations is what we do best, and we’re thrilled that the NTAs team trusts us to handle this busy period for them time and time again.”
