Based at East London’s London Stadium, West Ham United Football Club has been an enduring fixture in English football for well over one hundred years.
The club enjoys the English Premier League’s third-highest average matchday attendance — around 58,000 supporters per game — and has a strong international support base who depend on the West Ham United website for game updates. Every match brings up to a 10x spike in visitor traffic, driven in part by the club’s massive social media following, and by a Premier League blackout on televising Saturday matches in the UK after three pm.
“Match days and the buildup to games are when the fans turn to the site for news. It is a platform for the club’s manager to explain the strategy, player formations, and injuries of the day,” explains Richard Ravenhill, Technical Director at Skye Cloud, a West Ham sponsor and the club’s official private server and networking provider. “Throughout the game, the site provides West Ham fans with real-time updates of what's going on — explaining fouls and cards, updating scores, and more.”
Unfortunately, West Ham’s incumbent cloud service partner and legacy website weren’t up to providing the security, reliability, and performance the club needed during these matchday traffic spikes. The club experienced frequent website outages, causing impatient fans to seek news and fan merchandise elsewhere.