Most entries arrive in the final forty-eight hours and most of them are large files. Those two facts are the entire hosting problem.
Two workloads months apart: entrants pushing heavy files against a deadline, then judges reading them privately.
Portfolio PDFs and showreels are sent in chunks with raised size and execution limits, so a four-hundred-megabyte submission at 23:50 completes rather than failing at ninety percent.
The final two days carry most of a cycle's traffic and nearly all of its upload volume, so the site is scaled for that window rather than for the quiet months on either side.
Scoring pages sit behind authentication and outside the cache entirely, so one judge's shortlist is never served to another judge or, worse, to an entrant.
Scoring writes are idempotent, so a judge who submits twice on a slow connection does not end up with two conflicting marks against one submission.
Entry cut-off is enforced against the platform clock rather than a cron job that may not have fired, so the window shuts at the advertised minute.
The thing that ruins an awards cycle is an upload that reported success and stored nothing. That is a limits and storage problem, and it surfaces weeks later during judging.
Deadline traffic is upload traffic, and an upload occupies a worker for the whole transfer. Sizing for page views gets this wrong by an order of magnitude.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from entries being large files that arrive in a narrow window.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Upload size and POST limits | Raised well past the WordPress defaults, per entry form | A showreel or print-resolution portfolio exceeds the default limit long before it approaches anything the server cannot store. |
| Transfer method | Chunked with resume rather than a single POST | A large POST that drops at ninety percent has to start again, which on deadline night means the entry never arrives at all. |
| Judging URLs | Authenticated and excluded from the cache | Scoring pages hold one judge's view of a shortlist, and a cached copy would hand it to the next person through the door. |
| Score submissions | Idempotent writes keyed on judge and entry | A double-submitted mark on a slow connection has to overwrite rather than duplicate. |
| Entry cut-off | Enforced against the platform clock | A deadline that depends on a visitor-triggered cron closes late, and late is legally awkward for a competition. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, uploads that finish, and a judging area that stays private.