“As a Premier League club, we are a target that is constantly under threat…while we have been safe so far, we need to stay one step ahead to protect the brand.”
MO ALI - IT DIRECTOR, WEST HAM UNITED
A secure website consistently performing at the very top level
James Bishop • January 10, 2023
West Ham United Football Club (WHUFC) are a global business with millions of fans around the world demanding always-on access to live content, online merchandise and ticketing 24/7. The website needs to be secure and be able to perform whether it’s a match day with a 10x spike in traffic, a manic day in the summer transfer window or when the millions of global fans are buying merchandise.
The Challenge
Quite simply ensuring the very best website performance plus pro-active, cast iron security of the the website, mobile apps, and the fan base who access them.
Improving security
Our first actions was to switch West Ham onto the Cloudflare Global Network to improve the core security of its website and mobile applications. We wanted a partner that we knew could deliver and that's where Cloudflare came in. The WHUFC migration to Skye Cloud included implementing Cloudflare DNS services, the Web Application Firewall (WAF), and page rules to filter and redirect traffic. We also adopted Cloudflare DDoS mitigation — a proactive measure to strengthen its security posture.
Improving performance
We enhanced the website’s match-day performance by utilising the Cloudflare Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to handle the club’s peak traffic loads.
“The Cloudflare network delivers all web content to the West Ham fan base. Because we can offload that traffic, Cloudflare radically reduces the number of hits we take — in one 24-hour match day peak, the West Ham site received 11.5 million requests. Cloudflare handled over 93% of them.”
MO ALI - IT DIRECTOR WEST HAM UNITED
Reduced fees passed back to West Ham United
As a result of the Skye-Cloudflare partnership managing the website traffic so efficiently, Skye Cloud have been able to pass savings on to WHUFC as reduced hosting fees.
100% up-time
The best stats you’ll see in football! Not only has the partnership has eliminated lost merchandise and ticket revenue due to site outages and poor load times, it has significantly reduced cloud hosting costs with 93% of match-day requests offloaded to Cloudflare, coping with 10x traffic surges absorbed and crucially maintaining 100% up-time.
“100% up-time speaks volumes as a testament to the Cloudflare, Skye Cloud, and West Ham collaboration. There isn’t a better statistic to describe the results, Cloudflare just works.”
JAMES BISHOP - MANAGING DIRECTOR, SKYE CLOUD
Read Skye Cloud's James Bishop's article in Your Business Spring 2024
Skye Cloud wanted to form a long-term relationship with a load-balancing vendor to help deliver superior performance, reliability and failover across their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform as well as within several global customer deployments. Loadbalancer provided a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage and stable solution that will provide Skye Cloud’s clients with unrivalled availability and peace of mind.
Walking the dog, taking the kids to school and helping with homework. No long commute, tracksuit bottoms, happier employees?. There is a long list of benefits of to working from home. But with compromises in collaboration, a lack of collective agility and a potentially eroding culture,...there’s equally a long list of reasons to get your work force back in the building as soon as you can!
West Ham United's website needs to be secure and be able to perform whether it’s a match day with a 10x spike in traffic, a manic day in the summer transfer window or when their millions of global fans are buying merchandise.
Recently Skye Cloud has seen more and more of our clients using Nutanix and as a result, have seen first-hand the performance, scalability and financial benefits it provides.
During the last review of our infrastructure, it became clear that something more than a simple refresh was needed. Primarily to cope with further growth, but also adapt to changing patterns in demand, as James Bishop, Skye Cloud Director, explains
For years, the not-for-profit sector has struggled to keep up with the fast-changing pace of today’s technological world. Complex sign-off procedures, tight scrutiny of budgets/expenditure, and often a lack of in-house IT resources to define a cohesive strategy or manage any third-party contracts means that they are plagued by legacy systems, complacent incumbent providers and unexplainable rising costs.
Find out what the main advantages and benefits of cloud computing are for your business
Read all about the potential benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud strategy in today's business climate
Explore our top predictions for a sharp rise in as-a-service models for 2021 within the cloud computing sector
Find out why we have been appointed as West Ham United's first official virtual server partner
