We’re delighted the Liberal Democrats chose Prater Raines to develop and host their websites for their national, regional and local parties. We’re really proud of the Fleet platform we’ve built alongside them, and now supports over 300 Liberal Democrat websites.
As we’ve been working with the Party for 21+ years, we knew the challenges, especially around election times. Visitor numbers increase, by a factor, fast, and then do it again through to polling day.
So in May, when a snap General Election was called, we knew we had to be ready. And so did our website hosting.
Getting the balance of website hosting for the Liberal Democrats right is essential. It needs to be cost-effective through the year. It also must be able to deal with big increases in visitor numbers, fast. That’s always going to be a challenge (we learned a LOT about that in our first General Election in 2005). We’re delighted we stepped up to it.
We used a cluster of three servers (Brinton, Cable and Farron) at diverse locations, and used Galera and Gluster to replicate data and files between them. That array shared 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 supported the Party’s 100’s of websites through the entire campaign with zero downtime, and responsive sites throughout.
And while we’re here, a hat-tip to our datacentre hosts, Custodian DC. Alongside rock solid data and power connections, their technical support team are also second to none.
And the end result: the Liberal Democrats best General Election day ever, returning 72 MPs. The Party had a great election campaign, and delivered a stunning result. Prater Raines are proud to have been part of it.