The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is in the process of moving its websites to Rackspace’s public cloud to help it cope with the high-volume of traffic it experiences during awards nights.

BAFTA has five main websites- BAFTAGURU the charity’s website to inspire young talent, BAFTA Young Games Designers, BAFTA Kid Vote, BAFTA Awards its data base of past awards ceremonies and its main website BAFTA.org.

BAFTA’s digital communications manager Pippa Irvine said over the film awards season in February the main website has more than 1m unique visitors and over quieter months 200,000.

“We wanted to host all of our websites together with the same supplier, so they know the system well and can provide a better service,” Irvine said.

Rackspace is helping the charity to move its websites from 24Gb physical servers - which BAFTA said has much more capacity than it needs throughout the majority of the year- to its 8Gb with higher performance which it said will reduce costs.

As part of the partnership Rackspace provides BAFTA with a “cloud specialist” to help with the deployment of its websites and is on hand during award ceremonies.

“The main benefit is having a dedicated technician on hand on awards nights, they’re on Skype looking at the traffic which is a big weight off of our shoulders, it means our teams can focus elsewhere,” Irvine said.

BAFTA said it is seeing increased website traffic year-over-year and is reaching out to more people.

BAFTA’s COO Kevin Price said the charity hosts three types of awards- film, TV and games.

“The televised events are going to get a wider audience but, people are becoming more aware of our other awards such as the Games Awards and the Children’s Awards. We wanted somewhere we can host our websites that are flexible with our growth,” Price said.

BAFTA started moving its physical servers to Rackspace’s public cloud at the beginning of the year. Rackspace is currently redeveloping the charity’s main website which will be launched onto the cloud by late summer 2014.