Four-fold peak traffic increase contributes to £31.6 million for Sport Relief 2010 so far
Howard Lake | 22 March 2010 | News
Sport Relief 2010 has so far raised £31,633,091, the highest initial total since the biennial event was first run in 2002.
This year’s Sport Relief campaign ran for nine weeks, culminating with the Sport Relief Weekend from Friday 19 to Sunday 21 March. The sportrelief.com website peaked at more than 400,000 unique visitors a day and in total attracted over 3.15 million unique visits during the campaign.
The Friday night telethon saw a peak audience of 9.4 million. During the seven-hour programme, 386,524 online donations were processed with a peak of 125 donations per second, marking a four-fold increase in peak traffic compared to Sport Relief 2008.
Comic Relief’s Sport Relief campaign operates two core platforms with Carrenza Hosting, a donation platform and a core websites platform. The donation platform consists of a donation application built in Java backed by a stretched Oracle Real Application Clusters environment that runs active/active across two data centres. This enables Comic Relief to process hundreds of thousands of donations, via the web and call centres, in just a few hours.
The platform uses VMware vSphere 4 for virtualisation, running on HP BladeSystem (BL680 and BL460 blades) and 3PAR InServ® T400 Storage Servers. At the front, Cisco 6500-series networking (including ACE and FWSM modules) provides security and switching whilst Zeus web server and caching technology keeps the traffic smooth. PayPal and RBS WorldPay provide secure payment processing at the back.
The technical support for Sport Relief 2010 was built on last year’s successful cloud computing platform, which won a UK IT industry award.
Charlotte Melén, Web Technology Manager for Comic Relief, said: “Millions of people have taken part in Sport Relief this year, helping to raise over £31.6 million so far. Our technology partners for the 2010 Sport Relief campaign have played a crucial role in making millions of online donations possible and we’re hugely grateful for all their support.”
www.sportrelief.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.