The Army Ten-Miler successfully transformed its digital platform to overcome major performance and security challenges, ensuring a seamless experience for over 35,000 participants annually. With the implementation of Concrete CMS and a performance-hardened infrastructure, the event has achieved zero downtime, faster load times, and enhanced compliance, securing its place as one of the premier races in the U.S.
The Army Ten-Miler is one of the largest ten-mile races in the United States, drawing over 35,000 runners annually. Established in 1985, the event attracts high-profile participants, including politicians, celebrities, and senior military officers, making security and compliance a top priority.
Situation
Managing a marathon website presents unique challenges, particularly high-traffic spikes around registration and race days. For years, the Army Ten-Miler website struggled with slow load times and outages during these critical moments, affecting user experience and event operations. They needed a robust, scalable, and secure solution to handle demand seamlessly.
The Army Ten-Miler faced three significant issues:
- Performance Bottlenecks – The website experienced downtime and sluggish response times during peak traffic periods, frustrating users and risking lost registrations.
- Security & Compliance Risks – With many high-profile participants, ensuring data privacy and security was essential. The organization needed full control over where user data was stored and shared while maintaining a seamless marketing experience.
- Content Flexibility: The website needed to accommodate evolving content requirements while maintaining a professional, polished appearance aligned with the race’s reputation.
Impact
The Army Ten-Miler's digital challenges had a measurable impact on its operations:
- User Experience: Site outages and slow response times during registration created a poor user experience, leading to participant dissatisfaction.
- Operational Efficiency: Downtime disrupted critical registration periods, increasing the workload for administrators and risking lost revenue.
- Reputation: A website that couldn’t handle peak traffic risked tarnishing the event’s reputation, especially with high-profile participants relying on a seamless experience.
The organization needed a scalable and secure platform to address these issues head-on. To address these challenges,
Resolution
PortlandLabs leveraged Concrete CMS to build a high-performance, secure, and flexible digital platform:
Customizable & Scalable Website
- The design was provided by a third-party marketing agency, which PortlandLabs transformed into a dynamic, user-friendly Concrete CMS theme.
- The system was designed to evolve with the race year after year, ensuring content could be easily updated.
Security & Compliance Controls
- Compliance measures were embedded into the system to monitor and control how user information was collected, stored, and shared.
- Secure integrations ensured marketing tools operated safely and transparently.
Performance Optimization with AWS
- While CloudFront provided edge caching, performance concerns led the team to implement a hardened solution.
- Content was pre-generated as static HTML from Concrete CMS and stored in AWS S3 buckets upon publishing, ensuring the site could serve massive traffic loads without failure.
- Rigorous load testing confirmed no performance bottlenecks, even under extreme conditions.
Results
Results
The new Concrete CMS-powered website delivered exceptional performance, reliability, and security:
- Zero Downtime – Since the rebuild, the site has experienced no scheduled outages, ensuring uninterrupted access during critical periods.
- Lightning-Fast Load Times – Pre-generated static pages stored in AWS S3 eliminated performance bottlenecks, handling unlimited traffic spikes.
- Enhanced Security & Compliance – User data is now handled transparently and securely, reducing risks for high-profile participants.
- Scalable & Flexible – The Concrete CMS implementation allows for continuous content updates, ensuring the website remains engaging year after year.
Conclusion
By leveraging Concrete CMS and a strategic performance-focused approach, the Army Ten-Miler website successfully overcame critical scalability and security challenges. The result is a highly reliable, high-speed platform that can handle massive traffic surges, ensuring runners and organizers can focus on the race—not website issues.
For organizations seeking a powerful, secure, and scalable digital solution, Concrete CMS provides the flexibility and performance needed to meet evolving demands.
ABOUT PORTLANDLABS
We are building a web for the greatest good.
PortlandLabs started as a full-service interactive media firm in 2002. Over the years, our website toolkit became the open-source ecosystem Concrete CMS.
Today we're focused on building high performance, complex web presences for larger organizations. We provide hosting, support, and maintenance for mission-critical websites around the world.
Our team has offices in Portland, Oregon but we primarily work online, making it natural for us to collaborate with clients, freelancers, and agencies around the globe.
We are passionate about the potential of technology to bring people together online. We are respectful of its ability to tear them apart. We believe in a secure distributed internet owned by the people.
Contact PortlandLabs
Website: www.portlandlabs.com
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