Cloud Case Study
ReliaCloud's Pay-as-You-Go Cloud Server Provides a Solid Gaming Environment for Preston Kelly
The Company
Preston Kelly is the rare full-service agency without the silo mentality and profit-centered motives that tear down an iconic brand story. Their in-house team focuses on disciplines such as Advertising, Brand Strategy, Design, Direct, Interactive, Guerilla/Street Marketing and Media Connections Planning.
Based on leadership and agency culture, Preston Kelly was named one of the “Best Places to Work” in 2009 by the Minneapolis – St. Paul Business Journal.
The Challenge
Preston Kelly annually hosts an online version of the popular holiday gift exchange game dubbed “White Elephant”. Players in the game of strategy, luck, and speed log in to steal one of three dozen gifts. Throughout the course of five days, gifts are virtually “stolen” and “restolen” until the clock strikes noon on Friday. At that time, anyone with a gift in their virtual possession can retrieve it from Preston Kelly’s Minneapolis office. Those who do not win big-ticket items such as a Flipcam, Twins tickets, and $50 gift cards are “given” canned goods which instantly turned into a cash donation to feed those in need during the holiday season.
The first year, the game was hosted on one dedicated server and firewall. It was such a huge success amongst their clients and contacts that its hosting environment couldn’t handle the amount of traffic. During the last twenty minutes of the game, the site was practically unreachable due to the high number of visitors vying for their final chance at a gift. The dedicated environment simply wasn’t scalable enough to handle the spike in traffic.
Another challenge was the hosting environment required Preston Kelly to allot enough capital expenditure to cover the setup fees and monthly cost of the environment. To ensure that peak traffic times could be handled, they had to estimate how many visitors would be on the site during the final moments of the game – as well as pay for the maximum load even though traffic typically wasn’t near the amount it peaked at.
The Solution
Even with the challenges during the end of the White Elephant game, there was demand for Preston Kelly to host the competition again the next year. The agency approached ReliaCloud for an affordable solution that would scale with their changing needs. With little budget for hosting the holiday game, they were attracted to ReliaCloud’s pay-as-you-grow cloud servers. With cloud servers, payment is utility-based, meaning users only pay for what they actually use. Cloud servers do not require any setup fees and are able to be turned off at any time. ReliaCloud appeared to be the perfect fit to host the game in a cost-effective way.
Preston Kelly deployed four load balanced Windows servers running Microsoft .NET with a backend Microsoft SQL database. Knowing they had the ability add additional servers within minutes as needed based on the popularity of the game, Preston Kelly initially started with five servers.
To ensure the site could handle the traffic this time around, ReliaCloud partnered with an external load testing service. This service was able to mimic the increased load Preston Kelly would experience during the heaviest traffic periods of the game - thus, ensuring the ReliaCloud solution would meet and exceed the traffic demands of the game.
The Results
The Preston Kelly White Elephant online game had over 400 participants the second time around. Players in the game logged in to steal gifts more than 3,000 times. The game peaked at over 65 steals per minute.
The agency was more than happy with the results of Cloud Servers by ReliaCloud. The scalability of cloud servers allowed them to forget about paying for more than what they needed in order to cover a few minutes of extreme traffic spikes. Preston Kelly reported no failed steal attempts, time outs, or database deadlocks during the game.
"We were delighted that the game functioned at 100% even during the busiest parts," Melody Lentsch, Director of Interactive at Preston Kelly, commented. "We’ve already decided upon using ReliaCloud for future projects."
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