Channel 4 overhauls its system to improve performance and tighten security on show site
Daniel Thomas, Computing 04 Aug 2005
VNUnet
Channel 4 has upgraded the IT infrastructure behind its Big Brother web site to boost performance and improve security.
The company has overhauled the system after seeing the number of monthly page impressions increase from 30 million in 2003 to 120 million last year.
Channel 4 is using technology from NetScaler, and has reduced the average time it takes viewers to download a Big Brother web page from 20 to four seconds.
'We didn't have a lot of downtime on the site last year, but we did have a lot of incidents where it would hang, which caused visitors to leave the site,' said Sam McGregor, head of new media technology at Channel 4.
'With the new NetScaler technology we have been able to reduce the infrastructure, which means we can identify where the problem is faster.'
Since installing the new technology in preparation for this year's fly-on-the-wall competition, Channel 4 has also reduced support costs and the number of faults it has to deal with, says McGregor.
The NetScaler product has helped consolidate many of its legacy cacheing, load balancing, web optimisation and security applications, which allows Big Brother's small in-house team to spend less time maintaining systems.
'We have three teams of producers and writers creating content for the web site 24 hours a day, and because of this it requires a lot of support,' he said.
'But Big Brother has a small IT team and rather than have lots of technologies, which requires skills and critical support, with NetScaler we are able to focus our knowledge.'
Channel 4 has also stepped up the IT security for the reality TV show's site after suffering from malicious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and hackers in previous years.
It is carrying out regular penetration tests of the web site, has strengthened intrusion detection systems, and can also switch on NetScaler's anti-DDoS and security applications where they are needed, says McGregor.
'A few years ago there was even a competition by hackers to try to graffiti our web site,' he said. 'We are very conscious of security. At the start of this year's Big Brother there were 2,500 hack attempts a month on the site.'
