Client Case The Spectator
The Spectator was established in 1828, and is the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language. In addition to their print magazine, they have a very interactive frequently visited website. This site was designed and managed by Interconnect/it, one of Kumina's clients. In 2012, Interconnect/it recommended Kumina to The Spectator, since then, we take care of their critical IT infrastructure.
Solution
The Spectator was in need of a partner that could provide them with a secure and reliable infrastructure. Our team worked together with Interconnect IT en the IT team of The Spectator to analyze the challenges they faced at that moment and could expect in the future. Kumina developed a stable robust infrastructure that is flexible enough to grow along with the organisation.
The infrastructure is based on a private-cloud solution and consists of redundant server clusters. Since 2012, the online traffic at their website has quadrupled. We are pleased that we were able to contribute to their success by sharing our technical knowledge and providing them with a platform that supported their growth.
Challenges
In the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014, The Spectator and Kumina encountered a challenge. The upcoming referendum and elections, led to a huge amount of traffic. This created problems with capacity, making the sites unresponsive at times. The moment the problems were noticed by our monitoring system, we immediately added additional caching in front of their servers and increased the numbers of servers, to spread the load. At Kumina we always strive to deliver assiduous fast service and support, should problems arise. So we are glad to say we were able to solve the problems within 45 minutes.
Outcome
Since then we made the caching less aggressive, which made changing the Spectator sites a lot easier. We continue to focus on making sure their visitors have a fast user experience, by delivering a high performance website, based on a stable IT infrastructure that is ready for the future.
Kumina has been involved with the current Spectator website since 2012 and have always remained solid and dependable partners. When first asked to write about our relationship, it came as a complete surprise to see that Kumina actually had other clients as we thought we were the only ones, such is the level of attention and detail we receive from the team in servicing our account needs. With over two million unique online users per month, The Spectator has a powerful online reach. It is recognised as the most influential magazine in Britain, by some margin. In the City of London and Westminster, The Spectator website is the first place to consult for the latest and sharpest political insight. We therefore have a strong online reputation to protect and it is great to know that we have dependable partners like Kumina keeping things running smoothly in the background.
Gareth Kime, Head of Production and Development at The Spectator
