The Operations Manager

The Grand National is one of the largest events in the UK horse racing calendar, and that means hundreds of million of pounds at stake for the online bookmakers and gambling sites. It also means a major headache for the web operations teams as they deal with the inevitable traffic spikes hammering their sites, at a time when availability and performance direct equate to money won or lost. Site Confidence monitored the home pages of ten of the top ranking online gambling sites on the Grand National Saturday, and some fascinating patterns emerged in the lead up to the race (16:15 BST). Firstly, lets look at the Contenders…   You can immediately see a range of availability and performance, with some of the traditional “bricks and mortar” bookmakers considerably slower than the pureplay dotcom’s like “DotCom #1” and Bet365. Option 1 – Do nothing… and #fail The first option is to “do nothing and hope for the best” approach, as seen in the graph above for William Hill, a traditional “High St