We originally met with Ladbrokes Coral Group in 2017 at their headquarters in Westfield Stratford, London. Both Ladbrokes and Coral were hosted on Amazon AWS however their internal team had no resources to host and maintain a WordPress blog for both Coral and Ladbrokes. Therefore they used a third party to host and maintain their WordPress sites, WPEngine. However they experienced regular downtimes when Ladbrokes Coral received traffic spikes, which was quite often in their industry.
Traffic spikes in the Sports industry
You see a company in the sports business regularly receives significantly high traffic spikes that come in very sudden. It isn’t abnormal to see 50 users online, reading blog posts and suddenly you have 250,000 users online within a space of 60 seconds in the sports world. WPEngine just couldn’t scale to handle this level of demand, nevermind how sudden traffic spikes can happen due to popular articles being published on Google News and social media platforms which is difficult to predict making hosting the WordPress blog extremely difficult.
Moving to AWS
They originally considered hosting it internally on Amazon AWS, however the running costs were just unjustifiable. Whereas AWS can scale to meet the demand, it takes a while to scale up, often minutes. This becomes a major issue as the WordPress blog would crash well before AWS can scale up. A solution to this is to run multiple AWS servers, ready to take on traffic spikes however running costs are in the thousands per month which wasn’t feasible for Ladbrokes Coral, nevermind the internal resource required to maintain it all.
This is where Koerge comes in
Once we understood their issues and frustrations we offered them our Platinum package in addition to a proprietary custom caching solution developed by Koerge. Ladbrokes Coral were reluctant at first but gave us a try. The WordPress migration process took just over a day to move over, test and put it into production.
Ladbrokes Coral were originally stunned at the difference in speed when logged into WordPress, but still skeptical on how we will cope with traffic spikes. It wasn’t long before both Ladbrokes and Corals WordPress sites received their first traffic spike on Koerge, peaking at 180,000 users online! Koerge dealt with the traffic without a single glitch.
Fast Forward to 2022
A few years have gone passed and Ladbrokes Coral has never looked back on their decision to move over to us. Below is a recent traffic spike received by Ladbrokes, totaling 326,000 users online on a WordPress site!
It doesn’t matter if you are a small business with limited funding or a large enterprise like Ladbrokes Coral. Koerge can help.
