Mango Bikes had a problem….they were too popular, after appearing on the BBC3 show “Be your own Boss” their website was overwhelmed with traffic, causing it to be down for over 24 hours and costing the new business sales and exposure.
Being quite keen to get our hands on one of their funky multi coloured bikes, we approached Mango Bikes and asked if they would be interested in us hosting their site on our high availability infrastructure to ensure their site was online to maximise any exposure from the TV show. Within a few hours we had moved their site to our VMware infrastructure, getting their site back online and loading quickly, ready for their next TV appearance.
The server is just one element in hosting a high traffic site, we also took a number of steps in order to improve the general performance of the site. By looking at how the site code could be optimised, implementing different levels of file caching and closely monitoring the site performance to allow every element to be tuned and optimised to deal with the high traffic associated with being on TV. We managed this full process for Mango Bikes so they could focus on dealing with all their orders.
There were a number of repeats of the episode and this caused the site to become to get busier and busier resulting in over 1500 connections a second. The site remained online and the orders kept flying in.
The catalyst2 team were on hand the whole time, constantly monitoring the site and analysing how additional performance gains could be made on the managed server.
Ben Harrison, Director at Mango Bikes said: “catalyst2 worked flat out to make sure the changeover happened quickly and effortlessly. The result was the even when receiving 1500 connections per second our “data intensive” website kept running at speeds quicker than we had seen on the old servers. On top of all this, catalyst2 sent us extra data and info regarding traffic that we hadn’t even asked for, and gave us some pointers on making the website a bit more secure and faster. All round a great service!”
Get your Mango Bike at http://www.mangobikes.co.uk and find out more about our high availability servers.
