Hosting millions of online visitors
Delivering online footfall for millions
When we were asked to deliver the hosting capability for the website of one of the world’s most iconic buildings which attracts an annual footfall of around 2 million and receives millions of online visitors – we just couldn’t say no.
After a successful launch of the new website with hosting to support its millions of online users, people can discover online and enjoy the rich legacy of Westminster Abbey in London and all of its associated events and activities.
The Challenge
To provide World Heritage Site, Westminster Abbey in central London, with a reliable and agile hosting platform, where performance and reliability were as important as the scalability needed to be able to quickly respond to spikes in traffic and potential security incidents.
Zebedee’s proven experience hosting high profile websites such as Microsite web design for Church of England and the Web design for Anglican Communion, combined with our extensive experience of 10 years hosting Umbraco (and add that over 50 Umbraco installations under our belt), meant that we were well positioned to meet the brief. Our team of in-house certified developers were able to provide the right hosting support for a highly agile and secure platform on this popular yet constantly evolving CMS solution.
Azure hosting brings it together
Consulting on the recommended Umbraco settings for the Microsoft Azure platform, based on a combination of Servers, Web and Logic Apps, Databases, Blob storage and caching solutions, we achieved the fast and reliable performance needed for the high volume of content on this site.
Zebedee provided Microsoft Azure resources supported by CDN and caching capabilities from Cloudflare. The platform is also supported by Rackspace in order to ensure a very strict uptime criteria and expert advice on solving any performance issues.
We believe that team work makes the dream work! We worked closely with the website developers, the Westminster Abbey team and our solution providers at Rackspace and Microsoft, to facilitate the completion of extensive load testing to ensure adequate performance levels on extreme web traffic conditions.
We’re really happy with the service we’ve had from Zebedee. If there’s ever a problem – and there rarely is – it’s fixed very promptly.