Our Collaboration with Gage Awards Event

In Margaret Mead’s words, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”

Sometime in February, The GAGE Awards team reached out to us for collaboration because their website had so much traffic; many people visited it to vote or vote for their favorite candidates.

The GAGE Awards aim to recognize and honor the smartest talents, brands, or organizations who have enriched lives in 2020 by using the power of digital to make our daily lives easier. The award annually acknowledges honors awards and amplifies the exceptional activities and services to the digital world by the ultimate recipients.

Mr. Johnson Anorh, the Convener of the GAGE Awards, said narrowing down over 15,000 nominees was a difficult challenge as Nigerians used digital media to vote on who best represented them in the previous year. The figures were overwhelming, with over 1.4 million page views in less than 24 hours. #goodproblem

With the help of our analytics tool, they were able to determine the size of their traffic and the impact of their marketing strategies in alignment with their goal.

Just in the nick of time, when services were failing, and their website was consistently going in and out, our team was on standby to save the day. Our Tech guys should be called “Super-techies” at this point.

How We Got the Job Done

After having a session with the ProDevs team, we got the memo and detected the irregularities on time. It took us 72 hours to bring them back online, stronger and more stable, to handle the millions of people visiting their website worldwide.

You must be wondering what was it that we did? Here are some of the steps we took to achieve these results

Migrate and Measure: There was no analytics tool to measure traffic and how large their servers should be. They were also on a shared hosting platform, which was not built for such a scale. So we know we had to provision a POC(proof of concept) and then install some analytics tools to measure traffic.
Created a POC: After the POC worked within 24 hours of informing us, we encountered another issue. We noticed that people were trying to hack the voting poll, so we took our time to add security measures to prevent the manipulation of results and promote fair voting.
On the third day, the platform was entirely online without the inconsistencies, and voting and marketing continued until the event was concluded.