Nova migrated its Great North Run website to the cloud earlier this year and will be performance testing it over the next few weeks.

More than half a million people will visit the site over this coming weekend for the BUPA Great North Run, as well as registering for Nova’s other Great Run events in Edinburgh, Sheffield and Portsmouth which take place in October.

Nova is looking seriously at cloud technology on which to build third generation systems that can scale out rather than up. Cloud technology provides the potential to bring in additional processing power during peak business periods rather than owning, managing and paying for that processing power all year round.

When peak periods slow, properly designed clouds allow processing power to be scaled down again, ensuring business demand drives the technology requirements.

Currently iomart Hosting hosts twelve servers for Nova which run the websites and entry systems through which 100,000s of competitors register to take part in its world class series of mass participation, televised sporting events and access useful information about training.

September is the busiest time of the year for the Great Run website, but over recent years interest has increased and the site now gets almost two and a half million visits per year.

Sarah Haran, MD iomart Hosting, said: “We’ve developed a strong relationship with Nova over the past five years which has allowed us to support the incredible growth in the popularity of its sporting events. The new cloud services we are providing for Nova will allow their IT team to manage future growth in their events portfolio much more efficiently.”