Situation Donio faced
Donio gained media attention several times in recent years thanks to very successful crowdfunding campaigns that made it into newspapers and TV. Most recently, the charity fundraiser for little Martinko, which received contributions from more than 300,000 people within 60 days.
For Donio’s server, such popular campaigns present a huge challenge. Website traffic is variable and quite unpredictable because of them, sometimes spiking up to 1,000 times the normal levels.
“In the final weeks of the fundraiser for Martinko, several million people came to the website daily.”
Branislav Berč, CTO
Challenge for Webglobe
As the company’s CDO Josef Šupka says: “It’s pointless for Donio to pay for an oversized server all year round. At the same time, we can’t prepare for peaks by temporarily increasing capacity for a month. Although we can guess which crowdfunding might attract donors, it’s hard to estimate precisely.”
To maximise savings, we hosted the website on our managed VPS, saving Donio the cost of hiring their own administrator. We configured the server’s performance to fully support everyday operation.
All our managed servers are secured by a special free service called CAF (Customer’s Application First). CAF is designed exactly for situations where there is a risk of server overload caused by unexpected traffic surges.
Action: how we saved Donio’s website from a major outage
Back to the Martinko fundraiser situation. What did we do to prevent significant website downtime?
“We were worried for a moment that the success of this fundraiser might endanger other projects, but your admins knew exactly what to do.”
Josef Šupka, CDO
With CAF, we can respond immediately to rapidly increasing server load.
Therefore, we:
- Temporarily increased server parameters up to 8 times (32 CPU cores and 64 GB RAM)
- Seamlessly migrated the VPS to a less busy server within our robust virtualization cluster
- Collaborated closely with Donio via our shared Slack channel and phone, debugging slow database queries that were slowing page loads and partially causing site unavailability
Result? Thanks to the quick action of our admins, Donio’s server stayed online almost the entire time during this huge traffic surge.
