People’s Choice Awards is an annual awards show that allows fans to determine the most popular actors, musicians, movies, etc. The first official show took place more than three decades ago, and has significantly expanded since then. Major interest from the general public, and increasing familiarity have inspired hundreds of millions of people to vote during the awards show each year.

www.PeoplesChoice.com serves as a yearround destination for entertainment enthusiasts to express their opinions on pop culture by voting in and creating polls. PeoplesChoice.com houses the voting platform for the annual awards show and features an extensive video archive and photo gallery of People’s Choice Awards telecasts.

Past Problems

The initial People’s Choice website was launched in 2005. Three years later, after increasingly high web traffic, People’s Choice decided to develop a new website based upon Oracle ATG Commerce software. The initially selected hosting provider was late delivering servers, and was unable to deliver a working environment in time to meet critical launch deadlines.

Solution

In order to launch a stable website in time for the voting season, People’s Choice Awards decided to leverage Spark::red Oracle Commerce Hosting Solution and Spark::red Scalability Services.

Results

Spark::red was able to deliver a working environment within 36 hours of being selected as a replacement Oracle ATG Commerce hosting company. With Spark::red’s rapid delivery and excellent architect presence, the new website was launched on time and seamlessly supported the People’s Choice Awards show voting season and massive user traffic during the television broadcast every year since its launch in 2007.

“Spark::red’s rapid environment delivery and excellent ATG support and application layer knowledge literally saved the day for all of us at the People’s Choice Awards. Spark::red has proven an invaluable partner for our ATG powered website, and has facilitated our success and growth by providing worry-free hosting and supporting our architecture and development needs with five star service.”

– Hooshere Bezdikian, the Executive Producer of Digital Media

In addition to providing a stable, high performance ATG cluster – capable of supporting the highest traffic volumes with excellent page response times – Spark::red’s ability to scale the cluster size up and down to support either seasonal or event driven traffic with month-to-month contracts allowed People’s Choice to meet the high traffic demands of the show without paying for more server capacity than actually needed.

People’s Choice’s website traffic on the Show Day has been growing through years and have reached 140,000 page views per minute in 2011.

PeoplesChoice.com Traffic (2010-2011)2011 peak traffic vs average traffic for People's Choice Awards PeoplesChoice.com Traffic (2011)

2010 vs 2011 People's Choice Awards traffic

“The advanced performance tuning and rock solid scalable cluster Spark::red delivers allow our People’s Choice website to handle more than ten times what most ATG sites do.”

– Hooshere Bezdikian, the Executive Producer of Digital Media