Hosting the Super Bowl

By Dennis McCafferty

This story appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.

February 4, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY

REVIEW) -- For a television ad campaign this year, the NFL has been

channeling the late coach, Vince Lombardi, in a series of voice-over

spots, which can only make you wonder what the often-crusty Green Bay

Packers legend — winning coach at the first two Super Bowls, in 1967

and 1968, and the man for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named — would

be saying if he checked out top NFL Web sites during the week leading

up to the big game.

Well, there's always going to be a

contrarian in the crowd. The fact is, however, that the NFL is as

popular and forward-thinking an online entity as it gets when it comes

to sports and the Web. New, user-interactive features seem to pop up by

the week. Web traffic keeps rising. And, as the Super Bowl approaches,

sites are saturated with a flood of even more fans, and additional

online features fuel the fire for the Big Game. Gender wise, it appears

that Super Bowl interest online is evenly split these days. According

to Yahoo! Search research, during the month leading to last year's

Super Bowl, demographics on "Super Bowl" searches indicated that 49.4

percent of the searches were conducted by women, and 50.6 percent were

conducted by men.

All this buzz has the Web hosts behind

the most popular football sites working overtime in the weeks leading

up to the Super Bowl.

Such is the case with Savvis Communications (savvis.com), the host behind the CBS SportsLine.com (sportsline.com)

sites, which dominate online NFL action all season long. SportsLine is

the home site for NFL.com and Superbowl.com, as well as sites for the

NFL draft, NFL Europe, the Pro Bowl and an NFL alumni site. Fantasy

football-themed sites also generate great volumes of traffic for

SportsLine.com. Superbowl.com was launched for the 2002 championship

game, introducing a daily, 90-minute streamed radio show with analysis

and player and coach interviews, video clips from every Super Bowl ever

played, streamed audio press conferences, and exclusive player video

diaries. The game play-by-play itself goes out via a live audio feed

broadcast in not only the US, but in France, Russia, Germany, Denmark,

Italy and Japan.

The demand puts Savvis on the spot. But

the company — which earlier this year acquired Cable & Wireless USA

Inc. and Cable & Wireless Internet Services Inc. to become the

largest managed Internet service provider in the business world and the

world's second largest hosting provider — is more than up to the task.

Savvis provides high-capacity hosting, content delivery, traffic

management and global load balancing to support CBS SportsLine's

connection with its customers. It also provides content caching, with

its content delivery network operations center participating in a

weekly conference bridge every NFL Sunday and football Monday nights.

"Because our caching servers are in front

of the customer's origin server, our operations center will often

detect potential issues before the other teams see them," says Greg

Furst, vice president of hosting services for Savvis. "By alerting the

other teams to issues, we are able to address them before they impact

end users. Using the CDN to enhance delivery from the site gives

Sports-Line the level of scalability they need to handle their seasonal

traffic spikes, as well as any unexpected newsworthy events that drive

traffic well above normal levels."

SportsLine has worked with the same host

for seven years now, though that host went through various corporate

incarnations before emerging as Savvis. Just as a football team

prepares for an upcoming season, the online players involved have

settled into a familiar routine.

"We make sure that Savvis is part of our

planning process for all of these things," says Dan Smith, vice

president of technology for SportsLine. "We collaborate with them. We

go over what to expect for the entire season. We start doing this in

May, even though the exhibition season doesn't start until August. It's

an intensive agenda. We walk through every point where there could be

congestion for the infrastructure. We'll have a full day of meetings,

then follow up in the weeks ahead with smaller breakout meetings."

The planning is needed, given the traffic

loads. On a busy NFL Sunday, Savvis delivers over 32,000 hits per

second and more than 700 Mbps for SportsLine's online properties. Last

year, a record 2 million unique users logged on to Superbowl.com on

Super Bowl Sunday, up from 1.8 million in 2002. An estimated 440,000

votes were cast online for Super Bowl MVP, up 66 percent from the year

before (with 265,000 votes). The wealth of SportsLine football contests

fuels some serious traffic and makes the NFL and Super Bowl-related

coverage second for SportsLine and Savvis, behind only March Madness

traffic. There are the 4th Quarter Fantasy and End Zone Attack contests

for fantasy geeks and Office Pool Manager and Office Pool Challenge for

would-be prognosticators to pick game winners. Last year, fantasy

football subscription billings alone grew to $12 million, up from $8.8

million in 2002, when SportsLine first introduced a fee-based fantasy

product model.

After the fantasy season is over, the playoffs kick in.

"There is a noticeable peak leading up to

the Super Bowl and the bulk of this traffic occurs on the day of the

game, continuing to grow throughout the game and peaking during voting

for the Super Bowl MVP during the fourth quarter," Furst says. "From an

infrastructure perspective, the strategic planning that was performed

earlier in the year between Savvis and CBS SportsLine.com pays off now.

The CDN team participates in these planning sessions as well, ensuring

that the caching network is configured in an optimal way to support the

expected traffic patterns. During the regular season, playoffs and

during the Super Bowl, the goal is not only uninterrupted uptime, but

also robust performance from the site. The operations groups from both

companies have worked out processes to deal with these high traffic

periods, including open support call bridges to immediately investigate

and resolve issues that may arise."

Fortunately, the very nature of the

scheduling of NFL events — compared with the rest of the normal,

day-to-day demands — essentially provides Savvis a break. "The traffic

patterns work in our favor," Furst says. "Usual business traffic in the

United States is low on Sundays and has dropped off on Mondays as game

time approaches. It makes handling very large spikes like we see early

in the season less of an operational issue."

SportsLine and other online

football-themed properties make up only part of the picture, of course.

There is also an abundance of team-produced sites that are drawn

heavily into the Super Bowl-user frenzy.

The New England Patriots are the NFL's

reigning champions. But not just big winners on the field, the Pats

have been leaders in online innovations and expect to stay that way. In

1997, New England was the first team to produce a nightly,

direct-to-digital video show exclusively for the Web. It produces 12

hours per week of online radio (six live, and six repeated) thanks to

local beat writer and player interviews, listener and user call-ins and

press conferences.

And the team's approach to Web hosting

veers off the well-traveled path too. It doles out its hosting duties

to some half-dozen vendors. The team says its hosting strategy is the

best way to have a particular company focus on its strongest suit. And

farming out the hosting duties a la carte saves roughly 20 percent in

hosting expenses as well, the team indicates. Marlborough,

Massachusetts-based Northeast Data Vault (nedatavault.com)

is the primary host for www origin servers and the e-commerce "online

proshop" that the main site, www.patriots.com, uses to sell

merchandise. Woburn, Massachusetts-based Mirror Image Internet is the

primary cache host. San Diego-based Nine Systems is the streaming media

host for both a 10-minute nightly video show; more than 12 hours of

online radio; and video and audio press conferences. Westwood,

Massachusetts-based SplitStream is contracted out for network

maintenance and server support.

NEDV provides typical colocation services

to the Patriots: data center space, highly available power and

bandwidth, NOC server monitoring and remote hands services. That

amounts to serving 30 percent of the online traffic for the team.

"One of the biggest online challenges for

an NFL team is the potential peak traffic should a team reach the

post-season," says Ken Bliss, director of engineering for NEDV. "In

most cases, the teams that end up in the playoffs and the Super Bowl

are not determined until late in the football season. Teams that have

not been in playoff or Super Bowl contention in the last few years may

not have a sufficiently robust Web site infrastructure to handle the

additional online peak. If a team's Web site is unprepared to handle,

for example, an unusually heavy e-commerce demand as fans attempt to

purchase merchandise, some fans may be unable to make their purchases,

resulting in lost revenue for the team and dissatisfied fans. During

the December holiday shopping season in 2003 while the Patriots were

making the playoff run, traffic served by NEDV to the Patriots

increased to 2 Mbps."

As the Patriots continue to win, the

online team can see the wave of traffic build. J. Trent Adams, who acts

essentially as the Patriots CTO (it's actually quite rare for an NFL

team to have a de facto CTO, further evidence that the Patriots are out

in front on the tech field), says the site will get 300,000 page views

per in-season day, and that number will double when the playoffs swing

into full gear. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, traffic will

peak at about 1.5 million page views in a day. That traffic builds up

during the Sunday pre-game, then drops sharply as soon as the game

begins. "That's by design," says Adams. "We work with the league and

our TV partners to make sure that the majority of football fans who can

watch the game on television will do just that. Our mission is to drive

traffic to the game itself on TV. But the second the Super Bowl is

over, our traffic goes through the roof. We'll see the highest numbers

that we'll see all season if we win. Everybody wants to go to the

e-commerce link. Everybody wants to be the first person in their

neighborhood with that New England Patriots championship cap or

T-shirt."

Like a winning team GM, Adams places much

value in trust when it comes to choosing his lineup of hosting

providers. And he's not sold on fancy tech-speak.

"The most important thing is the host

himself," he says. "You can talk all you want about the uptime, and

serving us the bandwidth that we need. But that's a given these days.

What's more important to me is that — when there is a problem — I call

over there and I know the person that I'm dealing with. I know that

he's a reasonable person who can do the job. I don't want some stranger

on the help desk. Beyond that, I need people on that side of the fence

who care enough to monitor their own log files and provide to us some

helpful suggestions. For example, NEDV recently flagged what turned out

to be a mis-configuration for us, just by carefully analyzing their

traffic counts. That's what we look for: A problem is identified by the

host because he cares enough about the overall product. That's a true

partner, versus someone we just pay money to. I'm far more sold by that

than what's on the spec sheet."

Throughout the season, there are more

than a dozen teams that need to prepare for the possibility of a

Super-sized crush on online operations — regardless of whether they

make the game. Take the Philadelphia Eagles, for example, a team that

has lost in three straight NFC Championship games. This year, the team

remained a strong Super Bowl contender. After adding standout wide

receiver Terrell Owens in the off-season, quarterback Donovan McNabb —

already a star — got even better. So the people behind

www.philadelphiaeagles.com needed to prepare for the Super Bowl as if

participation was a given. On the day of a typical NFC Championship,

for example, traffic reaches 200,000 unique visitors a day, twice that

of regular-season game days. The site is busy. The home page changes

three or four times a day with the latest streaming video content, as

well as a message board with 58,000 regular users.

"We're Type A about our online property,"

says Dave Spadaro, director of Internet development for the

Philadelphia Eagles. "The Eagles are as dynamic online as they are on

the field. Our Web site user fans are every bit as rabid as the ones

who go to the games, so we want to reward them every time they come

back to our site. We treat it like a network channel. If we don't

provide something new every few hours, we get antsy."

And the Eagles online operations unit is

not static when it comes to its Web hosting either, having gone through

five in five years. That was until this year, when it brought San

Diego-based Epic Cycle Interactive (epiccycle.com) on board for the second straight year.

"Other smaller companies tried, but it

was such a massive project for them," Spadaro says. "Don't get me

wrong. Our operation stretches Epic to the hilt. We're super aggressive

about it. But they're doing a great job. They've answered every call.

When we first spoke, we made it clear: You're in San Diego and laid

back. But we're in the northeast and we're pushy and demanding. So far,

it's worked."

For Epic, the focus is on flexibility and

focus when it comes to hosting the Eagles site — as well as the dozen

other NFL, NHL and NBA teams that it counts among its customers.

"The site needs to capture, store and

publish vast amounts of dynamic content as efficiently as possible,"

says James Fitzgerald, company president. "The site and its Web hosting

needs to be able to scale rapidly since the traffic and usage can

double from one game to the next — in some cases by the day or hour.

The Eagles do a fantastic job of creating a unique relationship with

their fan base that extends the experience on and off the field

directly to the fan wherever they might be. The results are countless

loyal fans that interact with the team on a daily basis. The challenge

is making sure that the site is responsive to viewers no matter where

they are at, so scale across the network as well as scale within the

network is very important."

The company is also finding that this

kind of experience is useful for clients outside the spectrum of

athletics and entertainment.

"In our non-sports side, we have several

consumer product companies and entertainment firms that are building

‘fan' type relationships, where the reliability and scale of their Web

site and marketing is critical to their daily operations," Fitzgerald

says. "One of our clients, RealAge.com, has international operations

where a countrywide prime time TV show will link directly back to the

Web site for a health questionnaire. This results in massive traffic

during a one to three hour segment before a return to normal traffic

patterns. Managing this across countries with multiple languages

requires careful engineering, scheduling and traffic management."

NFL league and team sites are only part

of the Super Bowl picture. Tourism sites for the local host cities

always find themselves jammed with fans seeking hotels and tips on

local restaurants and attractions for Super Bowl week festivities. This

year, the big game is in Jacksonville, Florida. Thanks to its host,

Santa Cruz, California-based RezKey Inc. (rezkey.com), the city and its main tourism site, jaxcvb.com, is ready.

The local convention and visitor's bureau

sites present a unique challenge because no one is sure who's going to

be in the Super Bowl until after the NFC and AFC Championship games.

Once those teams are finalized, there are literally tens of thousands

of fans attempting to get to that host city.

"The two weeks between the January 23

championship games and the Super Bowl date of February 6 are expected

to see primary activity on the site," says Dennis K. Coffey, CEO at

RezKey. "Fans will want to get to Jacksonville for the event, but they

have not already finalized arrangements. So they need to search for and

book accommodations, entertainment and activities. We're not certain

what the peak usage will be, but it could be huge."

That's not all, as RezKey seeks to raise the bar when it comes to online offerings for football fans traveling to Jacksonville.

"The JaxCVB Web site will provide the

first opportunity for Super Bowl visitors to dynamically purchase

online — via the Super Bowl host city — CVB Web site integrated

accommodations, entertainment, activities and merchandise from diverse

vendors," Coffey says. "Even for those visitors who have made their

flight or hotel arrangements far in advance via some other means, there

will be the opportunity for them to reserve activities and

entertainment via the JaxCVB Web site in advance of their trip or even

after they arrive in Jacksonville."

With added services, however, comes added

caution when it comes to infrastructure needs. There are plenty of

fires that could need putting out. So RezKey is connecting

simultaneously and redundantly to many top ISPs to ensure that the

failure of one can't take the whole operation down. It's also using

Border Gateway Patrol route optimization to ensure best routing for

users. And it's delivering its e-commerce engine and reservation

service as a Microsoft .NET compliant XML Web service.

"This makes us extraordinarily flexible

and scales easily to accommodate any demand," Coffey says. "The RezKey

infrastructure includes dynamic Internet bandwidth allocation that

scales to whatever bandwidth is needed to accommodate the demand."

Internet-focused efforts by the league,

teams, players, fans and other media outlets are dramatically extending

the possibilities for NFL fans to interact with the sport, through

multimedia content, interactive activities and e-commerce offerings.

And the fans, it seems, are on board. These days, the Super Bowl's

reach goes way beyond the television set. And the Web hosts involved in

supporting the game online are gearing up for a big test of their own.

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