Background
PTA Events is an all in one fundraising platform, with event management and ticketing, auction, raffle, donation, and volunteer features. Used by thousands of PTAs, clubs and charities across the UK, the platform has successfully raised over £48 million to date – money going to schools and charities which need it the most. The platform enables communities to efficiently manage events, payments, news, reporting, and volunteer management. By helping organisations raise and manage funds, PTA Events directly supports grassroots education and local causes, ensuring money flows back into the schools and charities who need it most.
The challenge
When PTA Events first chose Hyve in 2017, their infrastructure was running everything on a single server. Any issue could bring down critical services, such as emails, codebase, and databases, all at once. This would not only have a major operational impact but would affect the brand and the service their customers depend on.
Their previous provider primarily operated in the U.S., meaning technical support was not available during UK peak hours. For a platform handling thousands of users and transactions, reliability and responsiveness were essential.
PTA Events needed a UK-based managed hosting provider who could both stabilise their infrastructure, and scale with them as their platform and community impact grew
The solution
After deciding to evaluate alternative service providers and conducting online research into their options, Hyve Managed Hosting came out on top.
Our cloud engineers designed a strong migration plan, and our development and support teams were able to help PTA Events make the transition from their previous provider to our multi-tenant Enterprise Cloud platform smoothly.
This new setup allows their platform to scale seamlessly, while improving speed, uptime and security. Our 24/7/365 support team guarantees a response in under 20 minutes, with the majority of responses in under 5 minutes. This ensured that PTA Events could rely on expert help whenever needed.
Over the years, our teams have worked closely with PTA Events to continuously evolve their cloud environments, supporting new technologies, enhanced security measures, and ongoing performance improvements. PTA Events’ infrastructure now operates on multiple servers, allowing them to scale up considerably, and continue to offer their services for free to charities, PTAs and non-profits.
8 years on
Since joining Hyve, PTA Events has grown from supporting hundreds of organisations to thousands, with hundreds of charities onboarded in the last 12 months.
Their platform now processes around 7000 orders every day during peak time, contributing to an incredible milestone of £48 million raised for schools and community causes. As PTA Events has grown, our infrastructure and support have stayed central to the foundation of their critical services, meaning they can continue to do what they do best – helping charities and schools make a real difference.
With the addition of our global colocation services, PTA Events are given the flexibility to scale across countries, contributing to the £48 million total raised.
Behind the scenes, the technical foundations of their platform have changed dramatically. Many of PTA Events’ original servers were running on legacy operating systems and nearing end-of-life, which would have limited performance and left them without essential security updates. We rebuilt the entire infrastructure onto new, fully supported operating systems, with upgraded resources to improve speed and reliability. As part of this transition, we migrated the platform to our best-in-class TN2 data centre, giving PTA Events the benefit of newer hardware and noticeably faster virtual machines.
We also introduced a full suite of new protections, including a high-availability web application firewall, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and antivirus endpoints across all their servers through Crowdstrike. These new layers ensure malicious traffic is blocked before it can reach their platform, improving their overall resilience.
These changes combined provide PTA Events with a modern, secure, and scalable infrastructure which supports their continued growth and the important community impact they deliver.
Hear from PTA Events
“We wanted to find an organisation that would work with us to help us grow the company, and there are lots out there. We did some research and found that Hyve had fantastic reviews – nearly all of which were five stars.
Hyve knew exactly what we were going to do and when we were going to do it – it was a seamless process that was managed extremely well.
In the last fourteen months that we’ve been with Hyve we have had zero downtime, and it’s been absolutely fantastic. There’s an increase in performance and it’s not just us that’s noticed, it’s our clients as well and their end users.
We now have a platform that’s running extremely quickly, that’s running in a multi-server environment, that’s stable and secure, and it’s everything that we want it to be to grow.”
David Cooke, Managing Director, CEO of PTA Events
