About
The swiss.blackfriday website is a promotion aggregator built exclusively to sell Black Friday deals: the best online discount offers for more than 200 brands, including all kinds of e-shops, from the small ones to the market giants like Manor, Globus, Apple, HP, Zara and even Mediamarkt.
Challenge
Black Friday continues to gain momentum in Switzerland. But an experiment in 2016 showed that many e-commerce shops have realised that their websites are not able to handle the wave of traffic during this event.
For swiss.blackfriday, the task was even more difficult: how do you manage traffic peaks when you sell more than 200 brands in one day and you can’t even estimate the potential load? Assessing the potential wave of users and the amount of resources you need to have continuous uptime is not an easy task. In this case, servers must be chosen carefully.
How do you solve this dilemma: opt for a low-powered server to save money or choose several powerful servers to make sure that the load during this crucial event will not bring the website down?
Choosing a single server can save money but, at the same time, compromise the availability of the website at the worst possible time. Opting for several servers will allow you to cope with peak loads. But under-utilisation of the servers during the rest of the year will lead to unnecessary expenses.
The main question for the swiss.blackfriday team was how to manage the wave of consumers during this critical event and not overpay the servers.
What were they trying to achieve?
To avoid a bad user experience caused by downtime for 300,000 visitors on the day of the sales. To prove that they are a reliable and always available e-commerce centre, no matter how many users visit their site.
How has Hidora’s scalable solution helped you?
Let’s see how swiss.blackfriday used Hidora to manage a large number of unique users. The organisers created a highly available cloud environment to run their WordPress-based website using Hidora.
This environment includes two load balancers, two databases and at least two WordPress application servers sharing the same storage space.
Hidora PaaS distributes all these components over different physical hosts to ensure high availability. In addition, the MySQL database was automatically replicated, saving days of configuration and testing.
When traffic peaks, the Hidora platform can automatically scale existing WordPress instances or even add new nodes (horizontal scaling). Conversely, clusters can be reduced and resized when the load decreases.
As you can see, Hidora Cloud is a perfect solution for e-commerce sites with a highly variable load. Moreover, unlike Amazon Cloud, Hidora stores your data in Switzerland, according to Swiss law, which ensures an exceptional level of security.
Results
We interviewed the swiss.blackfriday team after the sales day and learned about their experience with the Hidora Cloud platform: The peak of 300K visits was absorbed without reducing response time.
How did WordPress handle the spikes?
During the Black Friday 2017 sale day, we received a huge peak of 300K visits including organic and paid sources from all over Switzerland. We had a lot of front and back office activity at that time and the infrastructure coped without any problems, the peaks were absorbed without reducing the response time.
How does automatic scaling (vertical and horizontal) work?
The challenge for Black Friday was to publish new content and offers on our multilingual system as quickly as possible and keep all the information up to date. With the auto-scaling system, we needed to have a very low response time with no discrepancies between versions, and the Hidora system worked perfectly in this way.
How has your production performance changed?
Before we implemented the Hidora system, we had a very simple infrastructure with production on a single server. This situation was the same for development.
With the Hidora solution, we were able to deploy new versions in a limited time without any problems.
How has your hosting bill changed with Hidora? Has it decreased?
We have reduced our infrastructure costs by 30% because Hidora has a ‘pay as you use’ pricing structure. So we don’t have to guess in advance how many resources to buy, we only pay for what we use. That’s one of the best things about Hidora.
What do you think about not doing DevOps anymore?
We think this is great news! We are publishers and we need to focus on content, not IT. With Hidora’s DevOps team, they know our project and the challenges we face, and they are very responsive with limited cost.
We don’t need to hire developers with system administration knowledge, because Hidora replaces this need.
Did Hidora solve your downtime problem?
The Black Friday operation does not allow for downtime as everything is concentrated in one day. The Hidora solution helped us to address the main potential problem of downtime during the day of the event.
