World Whisky Day
It seems there is a day for everything these days. National Ice Cream Day, National Talk Like A Pirate Day, and a host of other ridiculous days commemorating commonplace things fill our calendars each month.
Whisky lovers: pay close attention. Saturday May 18th marks World Whisky Day, a day actually approved by Scottish Parliament and endorsed by Scotch Whisky Experience and Heritage Centre, VisitScotland.com, and Scotland Food & Drink.
Recently, UK virtual private server and cloud hosting company iomart Group plc offered assistance to the website for this event. Why? To keep it from crashing, as it did last year on launch day.
History of World Whisky Day
Created by Blair Bowman, a student at Aberdeen University and co-founder of a whisky society back in 2008, World Whisky Day celebrates Scotland's well-known spirit at bars and venues all over the world. He felt there should be a day devoted to whisky, and decided to start up a website that would keep track of events around the world.
During 2012's event, about 20,000 people attended more than 200 events worldwide. It made BBC News Website headlines (front page, even), and #WorldWhiskyDay trended globally on Twitter.
So very many people visited the site to either post events or check out what was going on near them, the site crashed. Bowman explains his experience with the California company hosting the site to Web Hosting Talk: “When I rang up the hosting company we were using in California they couldn't even find my details. They said it would take 48 hours to fix and I said it can't because it's World Whisky Day today! I ended up manually inputting hundreds of events myself. Thankfully iomart have come to the rescue so the website won't crash again.”
iomart To The Rescue!
iomart, with seven UK data centers connected by a high speed fiber network, realized their services would greatly benefit the World Whisky Day website. Why would their services fit well with the site? Its Cloudsure platform, which promises 100% uptime and is accessible from any time zone.
In the words of Phil Worms, iomart's marketing director: “Blair got a fantastic response to his launch of World Whisky Day last year, it was even trending worldwide on social media, but he wasn't able to capitalise on this because the website was on a server that couldn't take the spike in traffic and the hosting company's support staff weren't responsive enough. We've put the website on our Cloudsure platform so that it has the scalable and reliable hosting plus round-the-clock technical support to ensure that this year's event is the toast of the world whisky community.”
CloudSure
The CloudSure platform, a service powered by vCloud, gives users total control. Highly reliable and secure, customers are given access to excellent 24/7/365 support and their own dedicated account manager.
Their vCloud solution, a virtual cloud server environment, makes IT easier and brings more flexibility, while at the same time lowering costs. Built on the same VMware-based architecture as your datacenter, it makes your datacenter almost limitless when it comes to space without taking away your control.
Parliament-Approved
Remember when I said that it was approved by the Parliament? Well, on April 17 of this year, the World Whisky Day Parliament Motion was approved. It congratulates Bowman for promoting whisky on a global level, and states “that (World Whisky Day) will be celebrated on the third Saturday in May from now on, and hopes that the people of Scotland and around the world will raise a glass of whisky on the day designed to celebrate Scotland's national drink.”
Do you enjoy a good whisky? Will you head out to a local participating venue and raise your glass?
