Case Study: Education Counts achieves scalable, secure delivery and handles 300,000‑view traffic spike with Squiz

Education Counts - Customer Case Study

Education Counts, the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s statistics site, faced a major publishing challenge when National Standards data from ~2000 schools (including ~2000 PDFs) and related reports were to be released. The site had run on Squiz Matrix CMS since 2006 but was hosted on physical servers that couldn’t scale on demand; the Ministry and Squiz needed a way to handle embargoed sensitive content, bulk upload and associate PDFs with individual schools, and add a National Standards tab for each school without risking downtime.

Squiz migrated the sites to the Squiz Cloud, used Squiz Matrix’s permission-based content to manage embargoes, and implemented a PHP script that parsed filenames, uploaded documents via the Squiz Matrix SOAP API and populated a searchable database used by a Database Data Source to drive the per-school National Standards tab; Varnish caching and real-time scaling (vertical and horizontal) were added for performance. As a result, Education Counts handled a surge to ~300,000 page views (about 60× normal traffic) — ~25,000 visits by 23,000 visitors — sustained service through peak demand, enabled instant scaling and optimisations, and left the Ministry managing content in their familiar interface while minimising ongoing costs for Squiz.

Education Counts