Another Election, Another Factor Increase in Visits...

Political Party websites don't get a bit busier at election times. They get a LOT busier.

As we've been working with the Liberal Democrats for decades, we knew that. Visitor numbers increase, by a factor, through to polling day. Although the spike was bigger for the 2024 General Election the pattern held true in May this year, with local elections in England and the Scottish and Welsh Parliamentary Elections too. It was bound to get busy. And it did.

Compared with a month before the election, visits to the Federal Party website went up ten times to the 7th May. The same (OK - slightly higher - about a 12 times increase) applied to the Scottish and Welsh Lib Dems websites, and many of the local sites where there were elections. As often happens, the visits to the Federal Party site went up from the election day peak by about another 20% the day after the election, which is something we commonly see - people are visiting looking for results and reaction. They then start dropping 

And we served all of that without a blink. Our sites remained online, fast and responsive throughout.

We run a cluster of three servers (Brinton, Cable and Farron) at diverse locations, and Galera and Gluster to replicate data and files between them. That array shares the load of serving content and gave us the ability to pull any server out of the line for updates and management and then put it back live. Using this approach we can support the Liberal Democrats’ 100’s of websites through an campaign with zero downtime, and responsive sites throughout. However we couldn't do it alone: you are only as good as your datacentre - and we find Custodian DC to be some of the best.