Open House Dublin is an event held in one weekend every October where almost 100 buildings of all types and periods open up their doors to allow citizens and visitors to explore the architecture of their city, with special tours by hundreds of professionals and enthusiasts, completely for free. The whole registration process is handled online and caters for up to 250,000 visitors. Up to 2012 every year the website was unable to handle all of the traffic that it generated and unfortunately crashed and caused confusion and downtime for visitors and administrators.
In the summer of 2012 we were contacted to provide a web hosting solution that would be robust enough to handle all of the hits, registration forms and user interaction with the website. We analysed the statistics relating to traffic in previous years and mapped out a solution that would work in the most cost-effective way. We set up a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with one of our hosting partners, configured it, migrated the website and monitored it while the event was taking place and it was more than capable of coping with all of the traffic.