“As a Premier League club, we are a target that is constantly under threat…while we have been safe so far, we need to stay one step ahead to protect the brand.”
MO ALI - IT DIRECTOR, WEST HAM UNITED
A secure website consistently performing at the very top level
James Bishop • Jan 10, 2023
West Ham United Football Club (WHUFC) are a global business with millions of fans around the world demanding always-on access to live content, online merchandise and ticketing 24/7. The website needs to be secure and be able to perform whether it’s a match day with a 10x spike in traffic, a manic day in the summer transfer window or when the millions of global fans are buying merchandise.
The Challenge
Quite simply ensuring the very best website performance plus pro-active, cast iron security of the the website, mobile apps, and the fan base who access them.
Improving security
Our first actions was to switch West Ham onto the Cloudflare Global Network to improve the core security of its website and mobile applications. We wanted a partner that we knew could deliver and that's where Cloudflare came in. The WHUFC migration to Skye Cloud included implementing Cloudflare DNS services, the Web Application Firewall (WAF), and page rules to filter and redirect traffic. We also adopted Cloudflare DDoS mitigation — a proactive measure to strengthen its security posture.
Improving performance
We enhanced the website’s match-day performance by utilising the Cloudflare Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to handle the club’s peak traffic loads.
“The Cloudflare network delivers all web content to the West Ham fan base. Because we can offload that traffic, Cloudflare radically reduces the number of hits we take — in one 24-hour match day peak, the West Ham site received 11.5 million requests. Cloudflare handled over 93% of them.”
MO ALI - IT DIRECTOR WEST HAM UNITED
Reduced fees passed back to West Ham United
As a result of the Skye-Cloudflare partnership managing the website traffic so efficiently, Skye Cloud have been able to pass savings on to WHUFC as reduced hosting fees.
100% up-time
The best stats you’ll see in football! Not only has the partnership has eliminated lost merchandise and ticket revenue due to site outages and poor load times, it has significantly reduced cloud hosting costs with 93% of match-day requests offloaded to Cloudflare, coping with 10x traffic surges absorbed and crucially maintaining 100% up-time.
“100% up-time speaks volumes as a testament to the Cloudflare, Skye Cloud, and West Ham collaboration. There isn’t a better statistic to describe the results, Cloudflare just works.”
JAMES BISHOP - MANAGING DIRECTOR, SKYE CLOUD
Read Skye Cloud's James Bishop's article in Your Business Spring 2024
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