PEER 1 Hosting, the global online IT hosting provider, today announced that it is providing a hosting solution for all of Seatwave’s primary consumer websites. Europe’s largest event ticket marketplace approached PEER 1 Hosting to accommodate extreme surges in activity of up to 50 times the normal site traffic, leading to multi-million page impressions on a day, with peak traffic hitting the site within 15 seconds of tickets going on sale.
In order to ensure the best price and performance mix for Seatwave, PEER 1 Hosting provisioned a virtualised solution across two data centres that can handle such peaks. To extend Seatwave’s ability to serve its customers further, PEER 1 Hosting is planning to provision a supplemental cloud hosting environment from Zunicore, its cloud hosting division. The high-availability solution has been designed to handle massive traffic and purchasing surges, providing fast page uploads, smooth checkout and 100% uptime.
Perry Dyball, eCommerce operations manager at Seatwave, said: “It is not uncommon for us to experience surges of up to 50 times the normal traffic levels, equating to millions of page impressions in a day, with customers hitting our websites all at once. Despite these peaks of transactional activity, the end-user experience cannot be compromised. So, when our existing agreement came to an end, we conducted an intensive review of the options that were available to us, specifically to improve how we could handle these peaks of demand.”
“The main drivers for us were performance and reliability, flexibility, cost, location and service. Right from the start of our discussions, PEER 1 Hosting proved to us that it was the right partner for Seatwave. PEER 1 offered the best mix of SLA, cost and service that we were looking for and clearly understands the needs of the eCommerce space.”
Luke Meyrick, Technical Account Manager, PEER 1 Hosting said: “The Seatwave challenge demonstrates that as far as hosting is concerned, one size does not fit all. We have created a bespoke solution that is able to deliver ultimate speeds and uptime for what is a business critical eCommerce environment.”
The custom solution covers two active locations, each of which takes advantage of enterprise-class technology including the EMC Clariion Storage Area Network, highly available VMware Clusters, Microsoft SQL database clusters, redundant Juniper firewalls and load balancing built to the customers’ specification. Both locations sit on PEER 1 Hosting’s proprietary FastFiber Network™, ensuring that data transferred between the two locations never goes outside of the PEER 1 Hosting backbone, supporting uptime and meaning that bandwidth is not compromised. The solution is fully supported by expert 24/7 support teams to ensure that it is running at peak efficiency.