British Heart Foundation implemements Ultraspeed platform for online health campaign

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) has chosen a high-volume web hosting service to handle more than half a million responses to its first exclusively online awareness campaign.

The Food4Thought campaign, aimed at encouraging children to eat healthily, is presented in a 3D interactive online game format.

The campaign is hosted on Ultraspeed's "infected" server platform, which has been designed to meet the high volume, short term nature of viral marketing campaigns

Paul Giles, online manager at BHF, said the Ultraspeed platform had performed well in dealing with the 390,000 visits in the first week of the four-week campaign with the added benefit of not tying the BHF into a long term contracts.

"Our previous systems would most probably have frozen with so many visits concentrated mainly in the first two hours after the close of school," he said.

The service is based on Ultraspeed's diskless server system, which eliminates the need for hard disks on customer servers and uses a storage area network (SAN) to provide applications and storage.

This approach contrasts with traditional server environments in which hard disk failure can result in the server being knocked out while the disc is replaced.