The Customer
The International Paralympics Committee (IPC) is the global governing body of the Paralympic Movement. Its purpose is to organize the summer and winter Paralympic Games, and act as the International Federation for nine sports, supervising, and coordinating world championships and other competitions. Founded on 22 September 1989 in Düsseldorf, Germany, its mission is "To enable Paralympic athletes to achieve sporting excellence and inspire and excite the world."
The Request
2012 witnessed the largest Paralympic Games ever, sparking worldwide attention and interest. The IPC prepared for this peak period with the launch of a new website, designed to offer rich media content and a fresher, intuitive user experience for visitors.Paralympic.org hosts the latest news and video footage, including an archive of previous Paralympic Games, historical results, as well as world and regional rankings and records. Built by Atos, a global IT services company and IPC partner, the website required provisioning for traffic peaks, from a hosting provider that could offer scalability on demand.
Atos charged Leaseweb with reaching these heights and keeping the experience live. As the IPC is a non-profit organization, Leaseweb looked to arrange an inexpensive solution that also promised flexibility within the agreement to scale during periods of high demand.
"Leaseweb provided a secure, scalable, and reliable hosting platform to serve the athletes and their billions of fans worldwide."
Philip Craven MBE, 2nd President of the International Paralympic Committee
The Solution
Leaseweb designed and provisioned a very cost-effective hosting platform, in accord with the IPC’s technical and end-user requirements. This included 13 dedicated servers with a flexible upgrade/downgrade provision to address the expected traffic fluctuations during the games. Leaseweb provisioned a combination of 8GB and 16GB HP ProLiant and Dell PowerEdge servers running on Windows and Linux, connecting them to a renowned state-of-the-art network.
2012 saw the most successful Paralympics ever and the Games’ website, the IPC’s most important communication channel, also performed to the highest level. Traffic spiked by over 300% during the month of the Paralympic Games 2012, so capacity was scaled-up ahead of the games to prevent disruption to the service.