The recently concluded United States Senate Elections, on November 4 2014, have been truly remarkable, especially for the web. From Facebook to CNN to Google, all types of media—either social, traditional, or organic—invested their energies in order to deliver the best US election experience ever.
But, an election is not a one-day activity. It is an ongoing activity and the election day is when this activity peaks.
When it comes to election-related matters, Ballotpedia has managed to lead the way throughout the mid-term election process.
What is Ballotpedia?
It is an online encyclopedia of American electoral system that provides accurate information about US elections, legislatures, local ballot measures voter trends, and school board elections. It is operated by Lucy Burns Institute, a non-profit educational organization.
Ballotpedia boasts a dedicated team of 34 writers and researchers contributing to its wealth of information. What sets Ballotpedia apart is its foundation on MediaWiki. This choice of platform allows for an open-door policy, enabling anyone to actively participate in adding and editing content related to U.S. politics. When considering hosting MediaWiki, it’s evident that platforms like Ballotpedia prioritize accessibility and collaborative knowledge-sharing.
The Unprecedented Online Traffic Hike
On the eve of the US Senate Elections, Ballotpedia started seeing almost the double of its daily traffic. During the day of polls (November 4), the traffic was 5 times of normal daily traffic and on November 5, it grew by 17 TIMES, a phenomenal rate of growth.
It was important for Ballotpedia to stay online as people from US and beyond checked its website for the latest information about these elections. This is where Cloudways played an important part.
The Cloudways Way Of Doing Things
With a dedicated and experienced team of cloud engineers, Cloudways successfully created an automated cloud setup on Amazon cloud servers to keep the Ballotpedia website up and running. The website is hosted on an auto-scalable setup, where, whenever a server reached 80% usage, a bigger server was launched in order to handle the increasing incoming traffic. This all happened in seconds and Ballotpedia faced no downtime or slow server activity.
Furthermore, our cloud experts kept a vigilant eye on the overall server performance throughout this electoral activity.
Cloudways make cloud hosting easy for everyone. We try to remove hassle in hosting websites and apps on the cloud. Ballotpedia focused on timely updates on the 2014 US Senate elections while we kept their websites up and running. If you are interested in a cloud hosting setup with high available, check out our Enterprise solution called PowerCloud.
Else, you can always check out the speedy Cloudways Cloud Platform by starting a free trial from the banner below.
Salman Mehdi
Salman Mehdi works as Digital Content Producer for Cloudways. In his spare time, he reads books, blog posts, or anything that catches his fancy.
