Wrenhill

Kew Gardens // www.kew.org

Opportunity

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had a Google Doodle day to celebrate their 250th Anniversary. With extremely short timescales, tight & unknown traffic levels (as Google provide very little in technical support) we analysed and reviewed their current website configuration and capability. Various enhancements and optimisations were made but we recommended that limitations in the internal systems would make it safer to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver the traffic on Google Doodle day, ensuring ANY volume of traffic could be met. In addition a new 250th anniversary site was to be launched on Google Doodle day.

Action

We separated and segregated the sites that would be affected between the CDN and in house servers. To two sub-sites (old & new) were converted to static sites via a staging server that could be tested before the live date. Once this was all performing well the data was transferred to the CDN provider and via a simple DNS change at Kew the service was switched and made live via the CDN network.

Performance

The Google Doodle day itself was very successful, with a major increase in traffic all handled by the CDN with plenty of headroom, at the same time internal Kew systems were unaffected and continued to provide a normal service. Several updates were made to the CDN sites during the day as it was marked by a visit from the Queen, which caused a lot of media interest. After the day, once traffic had fallen back to normal levels, the DNS change was reverted back to normal and all the services returned to the original Kew in house systems. These changes were completely seamless to the users of the website. The sites addressed were: www.kew.org & 250.kew.org and we continue to work with Kew providing expert network and infrastructure and hosting facilities as well as in other areas of support and maintenance.