Besides Slush, Nordic Business Forum is one of the biggest success stories in the Finnish event scene. What started in 2010 with less than a thousand attendees has now grown to a network of business events in the Nordics that reaches almost 10 000 visitors and thousands of live stream viewers from all around the world.
Finland, Sweden, and Norway all have their respective events that are famous for catering to the audience with world-class speakers. For example, the former president of the United States Barack Obama, and the Academy Award-winning actor George Clooney have gone up on the Nordic Business Forum stage in recent years.
With an event of this magnitude, there is a lot happening on the website as well. Tickets to future events are sold through the site in just a few hours and the live stream serves a massive number of viewers in real-time. Traffic peaks are business as usual for event websites, something that is too much to handle for many server environments.
The most significant challenges we’ve encountered previously were related to our 2018 event, where we announced the next years event and at the same time streamed the Barack Obama keynote for free. Especially the free keynote attracted tens of thousands of interested followers, and these simultaneous events caused noticeable sluggishness in the previous server environment.
Tommi Contursi, Nordic Business Forum
The search for a new service provider began in Spring 2019. A long-time partner of Nordic Business Forum recommended the services of Seravo, which quickly lead to a decision to move all four sites there.
Most importantly we wanted a partner who would make sure that our websites stay available even during high traffic spikes and whose support we could trust in case of a problem. Also, the Seravo developer tools don’t differ that much from what we have used previously and they are also constantly developed, which made it an easy decision to move our sites there.
Tommi Contursi, Nordic Business Forum
The sites were migrated to the Seravo servers already a couple of months before the conference to make sure everything would be in order by the time of the main event. The actual migration was performed by the partner that knew both the sites and the Seravo environment very well and thus could finish the work swiftly. All in all, the migration went without a hiccup, thanks to the professionalism of everyone involved and the comprehensiveness of the Seravo developer documentation.
From our point of view, the migration of the sites to the new environment was very fast and simple. The extensive developer documentation helped with the enrollment and all in all the the switch felt very smooth.
Tommi Contursi, Nordic Business Forum
The most visible change after the migration was the clear improvement in the site speed. So, everything was working well straight away but of course, the true test would be the event. Seravo’s automatically scaling servers make the sites resilient against high traffic and the additional standby support service is there to guarantee the success of a demanding event.
Standby support is an additional service to ensure the success of any critical events for Seravo customers, such as advertising campaigns, new product launches, or as in this case, huge events. The customer gets a dedicated expert monitoring the site load in real-time throughout the event, ready to proactively react to any challenges with site. The service also includes a thorough preparation with site caching and other resiliency checks.
During the event, our own employees have very limited time and thus having a pair of extra hands doesn’t hurt. We wanted to have a dedicated expert who knows the Seravo systems inside and out; someone who could react with a short response time to any problem. Mainly we just wanted peace of mind for ourselves and another pair of eyes to monitor the sites during the highest traffic spikes.
Tommi Contursi, Nordic Business Forum
On the event day, everything went as planned and the sites worked like a charm. Thorough preparation, active communication during the event, and the comprehensive reporting afterward guaranteed success.
We were extremely happy with the service. The communication flowed seamlessly via WhatsApp and we got regular reports on the traffic and the load. From our point of view the service just nailed it. The sites worked without any issues and the response times stayed low even during highest traffic spikes.
Tommi Contursi, Nordic Business Forum
With this experience, Nordic Business Forum can happily continue planning the 2020 event. With actor and the former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and the best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari on the speaker list, we predict it to be another busy year for the event websites as well.
Do you have an important event coming up and you are uncertain whether your website can handle it? Contact us to see what we can do for you.