North Yorkshire Residents Look To Council Website For Vital Information During Snow Chaos
GOSS began hosting the North Yorkshire County Council website on 19th November 2010. Almost immediately it faced a dramatic surge in visitors.
Online, November 30, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Thousands of school children, parents, teachers and other concerned residents accessed the North Yorkshire County Council website at www.northyorks.gov.uk for information, following unseasonably heavy snow that blocked roads and closed schools and businesses.
North Yorkshire County Council has invested in webcams at key locations throughout the county to provide live feeds to the website. In addition, online maps display primary and secondary gritting routes. News bulletins keep residents up-to-date on road and school closures, also published via Twitter.
Website traffic doubled in the space of a few hours on the 25th November. The robust and resilient GOSS hosting infrastructure managed this dramatic surge so that the website remained available and did not suffer any loss in performance.
Wendy Pain, Web Services Manager, North Yorkshire County Council, comments "The move to hosting with GOSS was very timely. The day of the first snowfall saw traffic go up 100% on a single day, but the website had no loss of performance. The provision of such a service has already paid off as our key stakeholders - the residents of North Yorkshire - were able to quickly find critical information online. Our citizens can have confidence in the services provided by the North Yorkshire County Council website.
As we have invested in a shared service hosting environment, other public bodies in the region can benefit from this robust service. It is much more affordable for others to join this proven solution, compared to procuring and maintaining their own system."
Robert McCarthy, CEO, GOSS Interactive, adds "Delivering the highest quality of service to our clients is of paramount importance to us. The hosting infrastructure has given the Council and its resident's confidence that when a crisis hits, their website will not fail."
North Yorkshire County Council has been a GOSS client for several years, using GOSS iCM (intelligent Content Management) to manage the main website and several subsidiary sites. In October 2010, North Yorkshire County Council awarded GOSS the contract to supply a shared services solution that delivers reliable stability to their web presence and provides other public sector organisations in the region the ability to host their websites and applications within the hosting infrastructure.
www.gossinteractive.com