UK charity Action for Children has chosen cloud provider Rackspace to tackle its big data challenges and scale up its IT infrastructure on demand.
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In an interview with Computing, the charity's digital communications data scientist, Darren Robertson, explained that the charity needed to find a hosting company as it moved away from a shared server.
"We had our hosting combined with our web development agency on a shared server with other charities, which was OK for a while, but if we ever wanted to change the web development agency we would have to move the website. This triggered us into finding an independent hosting company that we could set up our website with," he said.
In addition, the charity had to deal with large spikes in traffic. For example, when Stephen Fry tweeted about the website, five million of his followers were encouraged to visit the website.
"This could bring down our website, and was very expensive. We used to take a image of the website and put it onto another dedicated server a couple of days before [an anticipated traffic spike], then there are a couple of days when that traffic spike is happening and then it takes another couples of days to pull [the image] across," Robertson explained.
"What we loved about Rackspace's offering was that we could spin up an instance or as many instances as we needed and only had to pay for what we needed, and then easily turn that back down to a normal state afterwards," he added.
The charity did look at several other large players in the industry but Rackspace was chosen because of its customer service and support.
"They are fanatical about what they do and their customer service is absolutely brilliant. No matter what time it is we can get hold of somebody to help us. Rackspace gave us all the support we needed and the architects helped us to understand what we needed to do and how we needed to do it," Robertson said.
The relationship between the charity and Rackspace started in September, and Action for Children has since moved its website over to the hosting provider with no major issues, according to Robertson.
He added that the charity chose a hybrid solution as it felt this was the most secure.
"Charities are generally quite nervous about putting data in the cloud. Even though government is putting things into the cloud, from a charity point of view, the cases of government departments leaving USB sticks makes it nervous. Especially as we are dealing with data in the children and families sector," Robertson said.
"We had confidence that with the hybrid solution all of our data was safe and secure within the physical server and we had the ability to actually be able to spin up more resources as and when we needed them from the actual website. From a cloud point of view all of the front end is based in the cloud and all the things that drive the website like our databases, are in our dedicated severs," he added.
Going forward, the charity wants to work with Rackspace to use some of the technologies the cloud provider is working on like on-demand Hadoop clusters.
"We're very much into using big data and to be a major player anywhere on the web you have to start using big data," he said.
Action for Children wants to use more data to improve engagement with its website and enhance its donation pages. It will also plug its hybrid solution's database into a CRM system.
