The Anfield Wrap is an award-winning media company publishing both live and pre-recorded podcasts, radio shows and online articles about Liverpool Football Club. With over 28 million downloads worldwide, their podcasts have achieved multiple awards, including ‘Podcast of the Year’ from the Football Supporters Federation and ‘Best Football Podcast’ at the Football Blogging Awards. The company recently partnered with Nike to launch an initiative supporting grassroots football and they have also rallied support for foodbanks and charities in the Liverpool region.

The Anfield Wrap website was hosted on a single web server and single database server, but this setup was unable to handle the large spikes in traffic that occurred after content had been posted, especially after football matches. These spikes would often take the site offline until the number of requests had reduced. As an online media business that depends on the ability to publish content quickly, this was problematic for The Anfield Wrap, so they began looking for a modern solution that would perform better during peak periods.

Following a detailed assessment provided by Bytes which included a detailed TCO comparing their options,  The Anfield Wrap decided that migrating the website fully onto the AWS cloud platform was the best solution. Bytes then transferred the project to their dedicated AWS team, who worked closely with The Anfield Wrap to understand their detailed business needs and execute the migration of their production podcast platform successfully. The migration itself was performed by Bytes following an in-depth workshop to analyse their current infrastructure and forecasting their growth needs. This enabled Bytes to design and architect a future proofed, scaleable platform and allow them to develop new services for their fanbase beyond what was capable in their existing on-prem solution.

To support increased traffic, Bytes AWS utilized Elastic Beanstalk, an AWS component that auto-scales web nodes based on metrics gathered from the Application Load Balancer. These auto-scaling web nodes scale up during increased traffic and scale down when traffic reduces. Bytes AWS also applied similar capabilities to the backend storage, which they setup using the AWS Aurora database service. Bytes AWS split the database into a primary node with Read Replicas to enable horizontal scaling on demand. Like the web nodes, these database nodes scale back once traffic has reduced.

Bytes AWS also configured the AWS Elastic File System and AWS Elastic Block Store as backup and storage for assets such as WordPress plugins and themes. These highly scalable solutions work in the background for simple storage and backup, leaving the IT team free to focus on other tasks.

Now that it is hosted on AWS, The Anfield Wrap’s website will perform much better during peak periods. The overall cost of running the website is also reduced, as auto-scaling reduces the amount of nodes in service when the site isn’t being utilized, and security is increased thanks to the robust encryption and in-built security features of the AWS ecosystem. This is further enhanced by the rapid disaster recovery provided by AWS Elastic Block Store. Overall, this solution from Bytes AWS will ensure business continuity and a quality user experience for website visitors and subscribers to The Anfield Wrap.