The challenge
Charity websites can play an important role in providing information, accepting donations and supporting the communities they serve. This means performance and availability can become particularly important during campaigns, media coverage or external events that cause sudden increases in website traffic.
Hosting infrastructure needs to accommodate these changes in demand while maintaining reliable access for visitors and providing appropriate security for any personal, account or payment information processed through the website.
Our approach
When designing hosting infrastructure for a charity, our first priority is understanding how the website is used. We consider typical and peak traffic levels, the events that can increase visitor numbers and the importance of the website to the organisation’s services, alongside its performance, availability and security requirements.
Following a review of your existing environment, our engineers design a bespoke hosting platform around these requirements. This allows infrastructure capacity to reflect how your website is actually used, including additional resources where required to accommodate periods of increased traffic.
For charities that experience sudden traffic spikes following campaigns, media coverage or external events, scalability can help the hosting environment respond to increased demand without requiring additional capacity to be maintained throughout quieter periods.
Website performance is considered alongside capacity. Our engineers can assess the wider hosting environment and carry out testing to understand how the platform performs under load, helping identify potential issues before periods of increased demand.
Security requirements will depend on the website and the information it processes. Where charities accept online donations, provide user accounts or handle personal information, we can design the hosting environment with appropriate security controls around these requirements.
Our hosting platforms are fully managed, with 24/7/365 monitoring and support from our engineering team. This reduces the day-to-day infrastructure management required from your internal team, while proactive monitoring helps identify potential issues before they affect website performance or availability.
The outcome
Managed hosting gives charities access to infrastructure designed around the specific requirements of their website, rather than relying on a fixed hosting package that may not reflect how the site is used.
For organisations experiencing changing levels of demand, resources can be planned around traffic requirements to help maintain website performance during busy periods. Security controls can also be tailored around the information and functionality provided through the website.
With ongoing monitoring and management from technical engineers, internal teams can spend less time managing hosting infrastructure while retaining access to support 24/7/365.
What should a charity consider when choosing website hosting?
The right hosting environment will depend on the role your website plays within the organisation and the consequences if visitors cannot access it.
Common considerations include:
- Website traffic: Consider typical visitor numbers as well as campaigns, media coverage or external events that could cause sudden increases in demand.
- Performance: Your hosting infrastructure should provide sufficient resources to maintain website performance as visitor numbers change.
- Availability: Consider how important continuous website access is to your supporters, service users and wider audience.
- Scalability: If demand varies significantly, assess whether resources can be increased without maintaining unnecessary capacity throughout the year.
- Security: Websites handling donations, accounts or personal information need appropriate controls to protect the systems processing that data.
- Technical resources: Consider how much time your internal team can dedicate to monitoring, maintaining and troubleshooting hosting infrastructure.
- Support: If your website provides important services or information, access to technical support outside normal working hours may be an important requirement.
Customer case study
Meningitis Research Foundation (MRF) relies on its website to provide information and support to people affected by meningitis and septicaemia, as well as supporting fundraising through online donations.
When MRF redeveloped its website, performance and accessibility were important considerations. Mobile devices accounted for 60-70% of website traffic, but its previous site was not optimised for mobile and suffered from slow load times, making it more difficult for visitors to access information quickly.
The website also needed to support different functions securely, including user accounts and online donations. Working alongside MRF’s design agency, Delete, Hyve provided the hosting infrastructure for the new site, with security measures designed around areas handling account and payment information.
Following the move, average website load times were recorded at 684ms. The hosting environment also provided additional capacity for periods when awareness campaigns or news about meningitis caused visitor numbers to increase.
For MRF, these improvements supported the wider purpose of the website: making information readily accessible to the people looking for it while providing the performance, capacity and security required for the charity’s online activity.
As Rob Dawson, then Head of Communications at Meningitis Research Foundation, explained:
“It’s crucial for people to be able to quickly access our lifesaving information, and we can already see that hosting the website with Hyve is helping significantly with that.”