Rugby World Cup to rely on the web

The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) is relying on the web to interact with rugby fans worldwide during the 2003 Rugby World Cup and is preparing to be flooded with users in the lead up to the competition.

The has two websites - rugby.com.au and the Rugby World Cup 2003 site. According to the company that hosts the sites, WebCentral, the two sites have already begun experiencing high volumes of traffic despite the tournament beginning officially on 10 October, with more than 30 million page impressions logged over a three-day period.

"The majority of the traffic is coming from the Oceania region, with significant traffic also coming from North America, Asia and Europe," a spokesperson for WebCentral told silicon.com sister site ZDNet Australia. "The amount of traffic is consistently increasing as we get closer and closer to the actual event."

The spokesperson said the system was designed to handle 15 times the level of traffic it is currently experiencing.

"The web will be a primary source of communication for the World Cup," said Greg West, online services manager for the ARU. "All of our advertising and other promotions will direct people back to the ARU's web sites. We need high capacity and we can't afford to be down for one minute, let alone five minutes. If our site were to go down it has enormous implications for ticket sales as well as our corporate image."

"The Rugby World Cup is the biggest international sporting event in the world this year," said West. "We will be supplying and updating information 24 hours a day, seven days a week to an audience which spans both hemispheres and, effectively, never sleeps."

The 2003 Rugby World Cup runs for 44 days from 10 October, and will see teams from 20 nations compete in a total of 48 matches which will be played in six capital cities and four major regional centres across Australia.

The WebCentral hosting platform housing the ARU sites is based on IBM Tier 1 hardware running a Microsoft Windows operating system, clustered to handle large volumes of traffic. The servers are load-balanced using a Layer 4 switch and utilise a Cisco PIX firewall for security.

James Pearce, ZDNet Australia.