Client Case Study - BBC Castaway

No website is an island - Hostway wins contract to host
“Remote Control” website for BBC’s “Castaway”

Sandy beaches, wooden huts and virtualised, scalable servers with firewalls are not the most likely of combinations, but Hostway has drawn all of these together, by hosting the “Remote Control” sub-site of the BBC series Castaway.

Castaway began on 9th March 2007, and is broadcast from an island off the coast of New Zealand. The series involves a number of Brits who have to cope with life on a remote island. It was important that the website should be hosted by a reliable provider that could scale up quickly as the show gathers pace. The “Remote Control” sub-site, will allow viewers to directly influence the actions of the castaways, adding an interactive element to the show.

“Capacity planning for a site that has the ability to impact the content of a TV show is extremely difficult,” said Julian Phillips, Executive Producer, BBC interactive TV. “We chose Hostway because of the flexibility and scalability of the solution that they recommended.”

To meet its requirements, the BBC chose to have the website hosted on Hostway’s managed server infrastructure. Although the BBC estimates a large number of viewers will log onto the website at the start of its lifecycle, it does not know how popular or busy the site could ultimately get. Consequently, Hostway decided to place Castaway’s “Remote Control” site on its enterprise level on-demand VMWare platform, allowing extra virtual servers to be added within minutes, and thereby seamlessly expanding server capacity if required.

“Television show websites are always extremely popular,” said Neil Barton, director, Hostway. “Because of the interactive elements involved, and the episodic nature of the programme, we are expecting peaks and troughs in usage, so it’s important that the hosting arrangements are robust and can scale up as needed to match this.”

The site is also load-balanced, so that Hostway can ensure that the site always performs in line with public expectations. The traffic is divided equally between a number of virtual servers, which can be scaled up or down as needed. The servers are secured with resilient firewalls which ensure that the site is safe from abuse. Hostway provides 24/7 support so that the BBC can always reach technical support staff in case of any queries or requests.

Pictures for Castaway can be downloaded from the BBC Pictures Website at www.bbcpictures.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/castaway/