Sport Relief 2012 attracted record numbers of donations totalling over £52 million, incorporating more than 300,000 donations and peaking at an incredible rate of 149 payment transactions per second. Based on a highly scalable and resilient cloud computing solution that is proven to handle extraordinary volumes of transactions, Sport Relief’s donation platform supported what is effectively the world’s busiest e-commerce site.

The sportrelief.com website peaked at more than 500,000 unique visitors a day and in total attracted over three million unique visits during the entire campaign. Donation processing this year surpassed the peak of 125 donations per second in 2010.

“The night of television can put a very large and sudden load on the web services,” says Caroline Lien, Strategy Director at Comic Relief. “Carrenza was able to ramp up capacity to meet these demand peaks ensuring an uninterrupted night of donations.”

Carrenza operates and manages two core cloud platforms for Comic Relief, a donation platform and a core websites platform. The platforms need to be able to cope with highly volatile traffic. Events such as John Bishop’s Week of Hell and Walliams vs The Thames can trigger a huge uplift in donations from the public.

“We never know what’s going to happen on the night,” says Caroline. “All we know is that we need Carrenza to provide and manage a platform that can cope with anything. The great news is that once again we have surpassed performance, both in terms of donations and transactions.”

Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza, adds: “We are delighted to work alongside our partners to provide a platform to support Sport Relief. It’s an excellent example of how cloud computing can underpin even the most unpredictable transaction management applications.”

The core websites platform supports all Comic Relief websites including www.sportrelief.com and www.comicrelief.com. The websites are all built using the open source CMS Drupal on a scalable LAMP technology stack (one of the largest Drupal installations in the UK) with bespoke deployment procedures overcoming a well-known barrier for Drupal at the enterprise level.