Isle of Wight Festival

Isle of Wight Festival wanted to ensure their website was robust enough to withstand the high user demand during peak times, including when next year’s tickets went on sale.

During the event in 2022, the client’s firewall malfunctioned, causing their website to be temporarily unavailable for a short period of time. The website is fundamental to the festival’s success, both for sales and publicity and operational reasons. Therefore, action was needed to ensure the site was more robust and remained accessible at all times.

LOCALiQ implemented a new website infrastructure for the client to ensure that the site could withstand high demand throughout the duration of the event. The new structure included multiple redundant web servers, a load balancer, and a separate database server, meaning if one web server failed, others could take over.

The website was routed through Cloudflare to add an extra layer of protection against DDoS and a CDN to cache and reduce the load on the server network. The website was also backed up to the cloud, so in the event of a failure or security breach, it could be immediately restored.

LOCALiQ also set up a number of redundant systems to ensure that emergency messages could be broadcast on the website and that the festival management had easy and quick access in case of an incident.

LOCALiQ’s improved website structure resulted in 14.4 million requests served in 30 days, with 1.53 million requests served in just 24 hours. Furthermore, over 2,220 attacks were detected and successfully blocked.

Monitoring was in place in case of an extreme peak in demand. However, this was not necessary as the capacity of the existing servers was well within the parameters set.

Overall, the Isle of Wight Festival website was hosted on substantially more robust and scalable servers. The site ran at no more than 20% capacity throughout the event, meaning no slowdown was experienced by site visitors, even at peak times.
 

Don’t take our word for it… Here’s what our client had to say:

LOCALiQ provided us with excellent support for the website fronting one of the best-known music festivals in the country.

They built and managed a fully custom server setup that met our technical needs throughout the event, which could also have been scaled up should anything unexpected have happened.

I had direct communication and back-up from the team throughout the process, and I was confident that the emergency and back-up systems they put in place would kick in if needed.

 

Dan Wavell,

Isle of Wight Festival