By Dennis McCafferty
March 9, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Not so long ago, come March, an essential workplace technology got quite a workout. Office workers jammed its capacity with unceasing user demand and, of course, it became overloaded and crashed, resulting in damaging downtime.
Back then – say March 1994 – that piece of technology was known as the office copier. The event was, and is, the annual NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. Today, that copier will still get a workout. But, as Web hosts now know, the strain is more than a bit lighter thanks to the expanding presence of the tournament online.
It’s a sports event so towering, it has not just one, but two, universally embraced nicknames: the Big Dance; and the even more popularly referenced March Madness. Whatever the moniker, the annual men’s tourney draws in both the rabid and passive sports fan. Even non-fans pay attention thanks to alumni loyalties and, of course, bracket-pick contests.
The latter is every bit the office tradition that whispered water-cooler gossip and mundane birthday cake celebrations are. Office employees fill out a sheet filled with the initial tournament game pairings. With 64 teams in the tournament, they predict who will win the first 32 games, then the next 16, then onward until they come up with a pick for champion. Usually, participation costs $5 or $10, with the winner claiming a sizable reward at the end. Given the natural tendency to second-guess one’s own picks, the office copier was essential.
These days, the real demand has moved away from that poor, overworked machinery. Office pools can be conducted electronically. Beyond that, the tournament, with its attendant worldwide passion for bracket selections, has emerged as a highly marketed event by major TV networks’ Web sites. Toss in fans eager to book reservations online to cities where their teams are playing; the tournament-sparked zeal for buying team apparel on the Web; and the popularity of Internet gambling sites; and you’ll find that March Madness may rival the Super Bowl as the biggest online sports event. In fact, some industry observers say it’s bigger.
And many hosting companies are finding lucrative niches within the tourney – whether they service travel, academic or gambling site customers. XOS Technologies (xostech.com), an online platform publishing company, provides hosted, streaming and e-commerce solutions to more than 60 college sports sites. Among them are top teams come March – proven winners such as Duke, LSU and the University of Florida.
Selection Sunday is the first big spike that XOS sees.
“Everything goes up as soon as the bracket pairings are announced,” says Craig Rosenshein, vice president of marketing at XOS. “Everyone wants to see where their school ended up. Then, the first week of the tournament is big, especially during business hours. That’s the one Thursday and Friday when an unbelievable amount of games are played during times when people are at their offices. Not everyone has a TV at their office, but most have a computer. And that’s where they’re getting news. Our college sports sites spike during this time because fans want specific information about their teams that they can’t get from the national sites. They want more depth. They want to know who’s starting. They want to hear what the coach has to say after the game.”
No online property occupies more of the spotlight during the tournament than CBS Sportsline.com (sportsline.com). CBS, of course, is the TV network that broadcasts the games. Every year, it strives to create greater online value at CBS Sportsline to further fuel fan buzz for the tournament. This time around, it’s upping the ante by offering complete tourney game streaming content for free at NCAAsports.com (ncaasports.com). Previously, fans had to sign up for NCAA March Madness on Demand, a streaming webcast offered via paid subscription. Press conferences will be part of the package, as well as highlights. This follows the January 2005 agreement that resulted in College Sports Television (cstv.com) providing CBS SportsLine and the NCAA exclusive video streaming rights for out-of-market game coverage of the tourney. Last year’s tournament served as the debut of that service, and CBS registered over 23 million total visits for the first week of games. Daily unique visitors for the first two days of the tournament increased nearly 25 percent over 2004 numbers. CBS SportsLine also saw more than 1 million users combined take part in its 2005 Bracket Manager, 2005 Bracket Challenge and 2005 Round-By-Round Challenge. Clearly, CBS is anticipating higher numbers this year.
The expansion of streaming content is all part of the broader strategy to establish CBS Sportsline as an advertiser-driven revenue property. In September, CBS Sportsline was launched as a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week extension of CBS Sports. Users can now access original video shot solely for CBS SportsLine, as well as archived content. Part of the new offerings included user-attracting glogs,’ short for game logs, in which original color commentary is brought to the online experience. Nike, Blackberry, Visa, Volkswagen, Geico, Subway and UPS are among the sponsors signed up for the online network.
For eight years now, SAVVIS (savvis.net) has served as the Web host that makes such ambitious plans possible. SAVVIS hosts all CBS Sportsline properties. And, given that SAVVIS execs are very familiar with the seasonal ebbs and flows, traffic surges on the site are treated as business-as-usual.
“Our systems and operations are built to handle spikes in network traffic and server transactions,” says Michael Tardif, vice president and general manager of global hosting services for SAVVIS. “CBS Sportsline.com broadcasts are a perfect fit for our services in that we can scale up to handle a flood of viewers and scale back after the event is over. For this customer, we maintain 900 servers under our management. We manage these servers both on-site through our operations staff and remotely via automated monitoring, security and change management tools. It’s exciting for us to play a key role in delivering the exciting content like the Super Bowl and the NCAA basketball tournament. In fact, we’re their largest IT supplier for these kinds of events. It seems like every year, they’re bringing something new to the event, so our folks are in constant contact with them making sure the IT systems are ready to roll.”
As with the Super Bowl, SAVVIS provides high-capacity hosting including servers, storage, and network-content delivery to stream the live and archived events, as well as traffic management and global load balancing to make sure tournament content is available around the world with peak performance. It uses patented software to allow CBS Sportsline.com the scalability to handle both the expected peaks and valleys of traffic flow as driven by fan interest, as well as spikes created by unexpected events during the week, say, an injury to a key player.
“The whole point to integrating our content management software with our IT systems and facilities is to allow customers to move the data around and manage it themselves,” Tardif says. “Web sites like CBS Sportsline.com are more dynamic than ever before and their Web-hosting environment needs to be able to be stable, secure, and flexible – especially for a big sporting events like this.”
At ESPN.com (espn.com), March Madness means one sure thing – the most traffic the immensely popular site will see all year. The very moment that brackets and seedings are announced, fans across the globe flock to the site to take part in the annual ESPN Men’s Tournament Challenge. The top prize last year for making winning bracket prognostications was $10,000, and an assortment of iPods, plasma TVs and digital cameras were awarded to runners-up. But, to the fans, it’s about more than winning money or prizes. It’s about the excitement and convenience of going online and putting your insider hoops knowledge to the test against the rest of the college basketball-crazy universe.
“March Madness ranks number one for us,” says Chris Nicholas, the senior director at ESPN who oversees the tournament challenge for ESPN.com. The site is hosted in-house via ESPN’s corporate parent, Disney. “It is, by far, the busiest event we have online throughout the year. We see thousands of users coming to the site to make their bracket picks per minute.” Last year, more than 1.5 million users did just that, making selections for 3.1 million brackets (you can compete with more than one version of your picks, and participation is free.) That’s well over twice the amount of traffic and activity the site saw in 2001.
Part of the reason for the huge surge in user participation is the growth of the Internet in general. But that’s not all. ESPN has aggressively promoted the challenge via its TV properties to leverage the event as a dynamic marketing tool that generates clear revenue. While ESPN college basketball commentators are mulling over the seedings on the air, for example, the network provides live feeds of what teams online users are picking to win big in the Big Dance. ESPN.com has arranged for exclusive insider’ reports from top names such as Joe Lundrai, the renowned “bracketology” expert as part of its $39.99-per-year premium content offerings. On the Wednesday before the games begin, ESPN.com launches a special promotion: anyone logging on to the home page is greeted with a large promo for the challenge with a link, instead of the usual home page images and content. Major-league sponsors are taking notice, with Pontiac and Mountain Dew emerging as top advertisers for last year’s tournament challenge.
“We’ll see, in years to come, that our Challenge will be made available in all forms of wireless communications,” Nicholas says. “You can make your picks right now on your telephone. You can get updates on how you’re doing on the telephone, and we’ll keep going to where fans are going to consume information. We also look forward to connecting fans to the Challenge via their cable providers and game consoles. Our sponsors see the need to be visible here and that’s where we’re going to take them. We have a firm lock on the 18 to 34 men’s demographic. They know that, and it’s a key demographic for them to reach.”
It’s not all about hosting solutions for top TV network sites either. There is a seemingly endless amount of peripheral media properties heavily invested in the tournament, from newspaper sites that cover hot teams to national sports sites.
San Antonio-based Rackspace Managed Hosting hosts one of the latter, the popular College Sporting News, which provides in-depth coverage of all things college sports – scores, news, stats and recruiting updates. The site’s bandwidth spiked in February and March 2005 by over 100 GBs compared to December and January. Rackspace provides a 100 percent network uptime guarantee to each customer, backed by five tier-one network backbones to ensure redundancy at all times. So the prospect of a rush of Web users to College Sporting News doesn’t faze the host.
“Our service team is even trained to implement new hardware, such as servers, in a matter of hours should the customer need an immediate upgrade,” says Frederick Mendler, director of customer care for Rackspace. “Rackspace technicians also conduct a weekly check where they log in to customers’ servers to make sure everything is running smoothly, proactively looking for hardware and drive errors. Many hosting providers utilize one network, especially hosting companies that are also network providers, but Rackspace pays for multiple network backbones from different carriers. If one network goes down, we have four others to fill in.”
Hosting the college-based sites, XOS is making the most of its sure hand in the games. Its customer’s college sites can’t stream entire games, of course, given that CBS has paid plenty for those rights – $6 billion over 11 years – and Internet streaming broadcasting dibs were a huge consideration in making that bid. But XOS can, and does, stream the pre- and post-game press conferences and broadcasts those on the college sites. At any time during the tournament, the company reports that up to a million unique visitors will flock to a school site. To prepare for the surge, XOS will examines its infrastructure with a thorough inventory in December, figuring out if it needs to increase server capacity and other resources. “The water mark seems to get raised every year,” Rosenshein says.
And, like many operations that provide hosting but also seek to get involved with so much more, XOS has a thriving, revenue-generating relationship with the colleges. It sells subscriptions to users for the streaming content. It partners with colleges on e-commerce, “bookstore” marketing strategies.
“If Duke wins the championship this year,” Roseshein says, “we’ll have the exclusively licensed championship hats and T-shirts right there on the site as soon as the team is cutting down the nets.”
Indeed, the merchandise factor weighs heavily during the tournament. Hosted Solutions (hostedsolutions.com) is based in Cary, North Carolina, with data centers in Raleigh and Charlotte – right in the heart of college hoops heaven, with Duke, UNC, Wake and N.C. State always on the radar come tourney time. Among its customers is ChannelAdvisor, which powers online auctions at eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Shopzilla, Nextag, Google and Overstock.com, all of which sell a ton of college basketball-related merchandise. The tournament, like other major events, requires planning, as the customer’s unique visitor and bandwidth allocation can increase by 500 percent.
“As a managed service provider, we focus on customer availability throughout high demand periods,” says Chris Hanks, president of Hosted Solutions. “We spend time with each of our customers forecasting peak loads and attempt to accommodate as deemed necessary. For some customers it’s just a matter of flexible bandwidth coverage for peak events while other customers require more grid related environments. It is not unusual for us to cluster robust hardware, software, security and balanced environments specifically geared towards the high demand.”
Security, of course, is always an issue. And peak times for traffic such as March Madness have lured online “mafia” looking to “cyber extort” sites that are closely tied to the tournament. Betting sites, for example, are prime targets for denial-of-service attack threats. Hosts need to be aware of such threats and present safeguards against cyber-terror to clients.
“March Madness is one of the most anticipated and highly-watched sporting events each year,” says Peter Rendall, president and CEO of Top Layer (toplayer.com), a security company that does business with clients that include Web hosts with gambling-site customers. “With this increased attention and resulting traffic burden on Web sites and networks, hosting providers have traditionally relied on having bigger pipes to deal with the increased traffic flow. However, bigger pipes alone are not sufficient to protect the network. DoS attacks are relatively simple to conduct. Yet, they can be orchestrated to deliver an overwhelming load from tens of thousands of computers around the world to cripple the hosting provider’s network. In fact, there are a number of ready-made denial-of-service networks for hire.”
Depending solely on traditional firewall technology tools is the way of the past when it comes to defending against sophisticated attacks. What’s in? High-performance, in-line intrusion prevention systems that can protect networks – ridding themselves of malicious traffic while improving network performance, Rendall says.
“This is at the top of hosting providers’ list,” he says. “With the growing threat of worms and viruses, denial-of-service and rate-based threats and unwanted access, hosting providers and the sites they serve are now implementing intrusion prevention technologies as a crucial component of their infrastructure. For these businesses, connectivity and time is money. So hosting providers must ensure uptime and network performance. Otherwise, their customers will quickly change providers. There’s a lot of money to be made with March Madness, so much is at stake.”
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