Bel Group turns to Interoute to manage the high traffic demands of its web 2.0 marketing campaigns

London, 4 November 2010, – Interoute, owner of Europe’s largest next generation network, has been chosen by the Bel Group to ensure consistent high performance of the Group’s corporate web site and its twelve brand sites, including thelaughingcow.com, kiri.fr, boursin.fr, apericube.fr and babybel.fr.

Bel Group needed a managed hosting service that could mix security and scalability to accommodate peaks in traffic generated by its web 2.0 campaigns.  It turned to Interoute’s Unified Computing approach to provide standardised support across the group’s websites, providing the flexibility to share computing power and meet the fluctuating traffic demands of different sites. 

“With Interoute’s robust and flexible solution, our marketing teams and agency partners are confident that each brand site can easily withstand the increase in traffic generated by their 2.0 campaigns,” said Arnaud Barbosa-Leclercq, Head of Change and Industrialisation at Bel Group. “Interoute has met all our web hosting requirements across a very complex ecosystem, and delivered beyond our expectations.”

The Interoute solution involved creating a private cloud to allow any of the Bel Group websites to react quickly to peaks in traffic generated by the email and online marketing campaigns. For example, one marketing campaign that hijacked one of the Bel Group’s home pages with the Laughing Cow brand caused traffic to thelaughingcow.com to increase by 50 per cent in 48 hours. The flexibility of the Interoute network and server platform meant it could be quickly adapted to support this influx of visitors.

“During the web marketing campaigns, the number of page views of the Bel Group websites jumped by millions,” said Gareth Williams, CEO at Interoute. “We know how to activate additional capacity quickly, either in reaction or anticipation, and can easily absorb double or triple the web traffic without needing to change the platform.”

To protect the websites from malicious attack, Interoute installed a firewall and high-level probe detection and intrusion prevention.

Despite each of the Bel Group websites being developed independently and running on different technologies, Interoute standardised the managed hosting platform and the disparate CMS and ecommerce applications – enabling the marketing team to deliver its web campaigns without being hampered by technical difficulties.